KUFIKIRI NI KUUMBA!

CRITICAL THINKING & CREATIVE RECONSTRUCTION:

REAWAKENING AFRIKAN DEEP THOUGHT

Image of Human Brain & Peneal Gland

A Critical Thinking & Argumentation Course Compendium

Editor
Dr. Ambakisye-Okang Olatunde Dukuzumurenyi

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Afrikan Wisdom
NOTE: These quotes and proverbs stretching back several millennium encapsulate the main
ideas of this course compendium.
Popular beliefs on essential matters must be examined in order to discover the original
thought. [Afrikan Nile Valley Proverb, 4500 BCE]
Images are nearer reality than cold definitions. [Afrikan Nile Valley Proverb, 4500 BCE]
What you are doing does not matter so much as what you are learning from doing it. It is
better not to know and to know that one does not know, than presumptuously to attribute
some random meaning to symbols. [Afrikan Nile Valley Proverb, 4500 BCE]
If you search for the laws of harmony, you will find knowledge. [Afrikan Nile Valley
Proverb, 4500 BCE]
True teaching is not an accumulation of knowledge; it is an awaking of consciousness which
goes through successive stages. [Afrikan Nile Valley Proverb, 4500 BCE]
To know means to record in one's memory; but to understand means to blend with the
thing and to assimilate it oneself. [Afrikan Nile Valley Proverb, 4500 BCE]
There are two kinds of error: blind credulity and piecemeal criticism. Never believe a word
without putting its truth to the test; discernment does not grow in laziness; and this faculty
of discernment is indispensable to the Seeker. Sound skepticism is the necessary condition
for good discernment; but piecemeal criticism is an error. [Afrikan Nile Valley Proverb,
4500 BCE]
An answer brings no illumination unless the question has matured to a point where it gives
rise to this answer which thus becomes its fruit. Therefore learn how to put a question.
[Afrikan Nile Valley Proverb, 4500 BCE]
Understanding develops by degrees. [Afrikan Nile Valley Proverb, 4500 BCE]
An answer if profitable in proportion to the intensity of the quest. [Afrikan Nile Valley
Proverb, 4500 BCE]
We mustn't confuse mastery with mimicry, knowledge with superstitious ignorance.
[Afrikan Nile Valley Proverb, 4500 BCE]
If you are thinking a year ahead, sow seed. If you are thinking ten years ahead, plant a
tree. If you are thinking one hundred years ahead, educate the people. By sowing seed you
will harvest once. By planting a tree you will harvest tenfold. By educating the people you
will harvest one hundredfold. [Afrikan Aphorism]
He who cannot change the very fabric of his thought will never be able to change reality,
and will never, therefore make any progress. [Anwar El Sadat]

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What problems must we solve as an Afrikan people? Our problems include the problem of
being dominated, not controlling our nations, being poor in the midst of affluence. What
goals do we want to reach? What quality of life do we want to enjoy? What kind of people
must we become in order to solve the problems that we must solve as a people? What
institutions must we develop so that we can act in terms of our interests? What kind of
social and educational experiences must we expose ourselves and young to become the kind
of people we need to become to solve the problems we need to solve? Unless education,
politics and economics are designed to solve our problems as a people they are pointless.
What kind of education and knowledge and information and skills and so forth must we
develop so that we can build the institutions, develop the relationships, attitudes to be the
people we need to be? [Dr. Amos N. Wilson]
Whoever does not inform his children of his grandparents has destroyed his child, marred
his descendants, and injured his offspring the day he dies. Whoever does not make use of
his ancestry has muddled his reason. Whoever is unconcerned with his lineage has lost his
mind. Whoever neglects his origin, his stupidity has become critical. Whoever is unaware of
his ancestry his incompetence has become immense. Whoever is ignorant of his roots his
intellect has vanished. Whoever does not know his place of origin, his honor has collapsed.
[15th Century Timbuktu Poem]
You are not an Afrikan because you were born in Afrika. You are an Afrikan because Afrikan
is born in you. Its in your genes, your DNA, your entire biological make up. Whether you
like it or not, thats the way it is. However, if you were to embrace this truth with open
arms, MY MY MY: WHAT A WONDERFUL THING! [Dr. Marimba Ani]
A race of people is like an individual man; until it uses its own talent, takes pride in its own
history, expresses its own culture, affirms its own selfhood, it can never fulfill itself.
[Malcolm X]
Whoever controls the images, controls your self-esteem, self-respect and self-development.
Whoever controls the history, controls the vision. [Dr. Leonard Jeffries]
One is fully conscious when he or she is the results of having been informed and instructed
by the experience of his or her ancestors and use that knowledge to master, understand
and become able to create institutions that allow him or her to live in harmony with the rest
of nature and the universe. [Professor James Small]

When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not
have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his 'proper place' and will stay
in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if
there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it
necessary. [Dr. Carter G. Woodson]
When you deal with the past, you're dealing with history, you're dealing actually with the
origin of a thing. When you know the origin, you know the cause It's impossible for you and
me to have a balanced mind in this society without going into the past, because in this
particular society, as we function and fit into it right now, we're such an underdog, we're
trampled upon, we're looked upon as almost nothing. Now if we don't go into the past and

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find out how we got this way, we will think that we were always this way. And if you think
that you were always in the condition that you're in right now, it's impossible for you to
have too much confidence in yourself, you become worthless, almost nothing. But when you
go back into the past and find out where you once were, then you will know that you once
had attained a higher level, had made great achievements, contributions to society,
civilization, science, and so forth. And you know that if you once did it you can do it again;
you automatically get the incentive, the inspiration and the energy necessary to duplicate
what our forefathers did. [Malcolm X]

Now consciousness, what is consciousness? Consciousness is being aware of one's

surroundings, recognizing the existence, truth or fact of something; being aware of the very
moment, the very instant that you are in; being aware of how you affect the human social,
political, and natural ecology you are a part of and how it affects you. Consciousness is
being informed and instructed through your groups peculiar culture on the effects of the
varied ecologies on your immediate and distant ancestors, and to be aware of their
interpretation of that experience. [Professor James Small]
I think every person that calls themselves a leader, a preacher, a policy maker of any kind
should ask and answer the question in his own life time, how will my people stay on this
earth? How will they be educated? How will they be schooled? How will they be housed?
And how will they be defended? The answer to these questions will create the concept of
enduring nationhood because it creates the concept of enduring responsibility. I am saying
whatever the solution is, either we are in charge of our own destiny or we are not in charge.
On that point we got to be clear, you either free or you a slave. [Dr. John Henrik Clarke]
O my body, make of me always a man who questions! [Dr. Frantz Fanon]
Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from
our land but from our minds as well. [Dr. Frantz Fanon]

Ultimately then, intelligence must be defined in terms of the degree in which it solves YOUR
PROBLEMS. The nature of education today prepares you to solve THEIR PROBLEMS and not
your own. That's why you study THEIR books, you go to THEIR schools, you learn THEIR
information, THEIR language, THEIR styles, THEIR perceptions, so when you come out of
school you can do a humdinger of a job solving European's problems, but you can't solve
your own. And then you DARE call yourself "intelligent?" C'mon. That's the height of
stupidity." [Dr. Amos Wilson]

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Elements of Thinking
I
What follows are some guidelines helpful to you as you work toward developing your
reasoning abilities:
1. All reasoning has a PURPOSE.
Take time to state your purpose clearly.
Distinguish your purpose from related purposes.
Check periodically to be sure you are still on target.
Choose significant and realistic purposes.
2. All reasoning is an attempt to FIGURE SOMETHING OUT, TO SETTLE SOME
QUESTION, TO SOLVE SOME PROBLEM.
Take time to clearly and precisely state the question at issue.
Express the question in several ways to clarify its meaning and scope.
Break the question into sub questions.
Identify if the question has one right answer, is a matter of opinion, or
requires reasoning from more than one point of view.
3. All reasoning is based on ASSUMPTIONS.
Clearly identify your assumptions and determine whether they are justifiable.
Consider how your assumptions are shaping your point of view.
4. All reasoning is done from some POINT OF VIEW.
Identify your point of view.
Seek other points of view and identify their strengths as well as weaknesses.
Strive to be fair-minded in evaluating all points of view.
5. All reasoning is based on DATA, INFORMATION and EVIDENCE.
Restrict your claims to those supported by the data you have.
Search for information that opposes your position as well as information that
supports it.
Make sure that all information used is clear, accurate, and relevant to the
question at issue.
Make sure you have gathered sufficient information.
6. All reasoning is expressed through, and shaped by, CONCEPTS and IDEAS.
Identify key concepts and explain them clearly.
Consider alternative concepts or alternative definitions to concepts.
Make sure you are using concepts with care and precision.
7. All reasoning contains INFERENCES or INTERPRETATIONS by which we draw
CONCLUSIONS and give meaning to data.
Infer only what the evidence implies.
Check inferences for their consistency with each other.
Identify assumptions, which lead you to your inferences.
8. All reasoning leads somewhere or has IMPLICATIONS and CONSEQUENCES.
Trace the implications and consequences that follow from your reasoning.
Search for negative as well as positive implications.
Consider all possible consequences.

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Elements of Thinking
II
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.

Whenever we thinking, WE THINK FOR A PURPOSE.

We think within a POINT OF VIEW.
Our thinking is based on ASSUMPTIONS.
Our thinking leads to IMPLICATIONS & CONSEQUENCES.
Whenever we think we use DATA, FACTS & EXPERIENCES.
Our data, facts and experiences are used to make INFERENCES & JUDGEMENTS.
Our inferences and judgments are based on CONCEPTS & THEORIES.
Our inferences & judgments are used to answer QUESTIONS & SOLVE PROBLEMS.

Elements of Thinking
III
1. Our PURPOSE affects the TYPE OF QUESTIONS we ask.
2. The TYPE OF QUESTIONS we ask affects the TYPE OF INFORMATION, QUALITY OF
INFORMATION, AND QUANTITY OF INFORMATION we gather.
3. The INFORMATION we gather affects the way we INTERPRET, i.e., DRAW
CONCLUSIONS OR MAKE INFERENCES about the information.
4. The way we INTERPPRET INFORMATION affects the way we CONCEPTUALIZE the
information.
5. The way we CONCEPTUALIZE INFORMATION affects the ASSUMPTIONS we make.
6. The ASSUMPTIONS we make affect the IMPLICATIONS that follow from our thinking.
7. The IMPLICATIONS that follow from our thinking affect the way we see things, i.e.,
OUR POINT OF VIEW.
Questions To Ask When Thinking

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.

What
What
What
What
What
What
What
What

is my fundamental PURPOSE?
is the essential QUESTION I am answering?
INFORMATION do I need to answer my QUESTION?
is the most basic CONCEPT/IDEA in the QUESTION?
ASSUMPTIONS am I using in my thinking?
is my POINT OF VIEW with respect to the issue?
are my fundamental INFERENCES/CONCLUSIONS?
are the IMPLICATIONS of my thinking?

Analyzing Your Thinking

Use the following questions to analyze your thinking:
1. Is this a good idea or a bad idea?
2. Is this belief defensible or indefensible?
3. Is my position on this issue reasonable and rational or not?

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4. Am I willing to deal with complexity or do I retreat into simple stereotypes to avoid it?
5. If I cant tell if my idea or belief is reasonable or defensible, how can I have confidence
in my thinking, or in myself?
6. Is it appropriate and wise to assume that my ideas and beliefs are accurate, clear, and
reasonable, when I havent really tested them?
7. Do I think deeply or only on the surface of things?
8. Do I ever enter sympathetically into points of view that are very different from my own,
or do I just assume that I am right?
9. Do I know how to question my own ideas and to test them?
10. Do I know what I am aiming for? Should I?
11. What is the purpose of my thinking?
12. What precise question am I trying to answer?
13. Within what point of view am I thinking?
14. What information am I using?
15. How am I interpreting that information?
16. What concepts or ideas are central to my thinking?
17. What conclusions am I coming to?
18. What am I taking for granted, what assumptions am I making?
19. If I accept the conclusions, what are the implications?
20. What would the consequences be, if I put my thought into action?

Universal Thinking Standards

I
CLARITY: Could you elaborate further on that point? Could you express that point in
another way? Could you give me an illustration? Could you give me an example?
Clarity is the gateway standard. If a statement is unclear, we cannot determine whether it is
accurate or relevant. In fact, we cannot tell anything about it because we don't yet know
what it is saying. For example, the question, "What can be done about the education system
in America?" is unclear. In order to address the question adequately, we would need to have
a clearer understanding of what the person asking the question is considering the "problem"
to be. A clearer question might be "What can educators do to ensure that students learn the
skills and abilities which help them function successfully on the job and in their daily
decision-making?"
II

ACCURACY: Is that really true? How could we check that? How could we find out if that is
true?
A statement can be clear but not accurate, as in "Most dogs are over 300 pounds in weight."

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III

PRECISION: Could you give more details? Could you be more specific?
A statement can be both clear and accurate, but not precise, as in "Jack is overweight." (We
don't know how overweight Jack is, one pound or 500 pounds.)
IV

RELEVANCE: How is that connected to the question? How does that bear on the issue?
A statement can be clear, accurate, and precise, but not relevant to the question at issue.
For example, students often think that the amount of effort they put into a course should be
used in raising their grade in a course. Often, however, the "effort" does not measure the
quality of student learning, and when this is so, effort is irrelevant to their appropriate
grade.
V

DEPTH: How does your answer address the complexities in the question? How are you
taking into account the problems in the question? Is that dealing with the most significant
factors?
A statement can be clear, accurate, precise, and relevant, but superficial (that is, lack
depth). For example, the statement "Just say No" which is often used to discourage children
and teens for using drugs, is clear, accurate, precise, and relevant. Nevertheless, it lacks
depth because it treats an extremely complex issue, the pervasive problem of drug use
among young people, superficially. It fails to deal with the complexities of the issue.

VI

BREADTH: Do we need to consider another point of view? Is there another way to look at
this question? What would this look like from a conservative standpoint? What would this
look like from the point of view of...?
A line of reasoning may be clear accurate, precise, relevant, and deep, but lack breadth (as
in an argument from either the conservative or liberal standpoint which gets deeply into an
issue, but only recognizes the insights of one side of the question.)

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VII

LOGIC: Does this really make sense? Does that follow from what you said? How does that
follow? But before you implied this and now you are saying that; how can both be true?
When we think, we bring a variety of thoughts together into some order. When the
combination of thoughts are mutually supporting and make sense in combination, the
thinking is "logical." When the combination is not mutually supporting, is contradictory in
some sense, or does not "make sense," the combination is not logical.

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Readings
I
The Difference Between High School and College
(Chapter 2 from College Thinking: How to Get the Best Out of College, by Jack W.
Meiland, Mentor Book/The New American Library, New York, 1981. Copyright Jack
W. Meiland. Jack Meiland was a professor of philosophy at the University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor. )
Since you know what high school work is like, we can approach the nature of college work
by comparing college with high school. College freshmen believe that there must be a
difference between high school and college, but their ideas about what the difference is are
often radically mistaken. Students often see the function of high school as the teaching of
facts and basic skills. They see high school as a continuation of elementary and junior high
school in this respect. In senior high school, one learns physics and chemistry,
trigonometry, American and world history--all subjects in which the "facts" to be learned are
harder, but in which the method is much the same as in elementary and junior high school.
The method of study most commonly used is memorization, although students are also
called upon to apply memorized formulas in working problems and to make deductions in
mathematical proofs. There are some exceptional high school classes, and some exceptional
high schools, in which this is not so. But by and large, the perceived emphasis in secondary
education is on learning facts through memorization. The secondary school teacher holds a
position of authority because he has mastered factual information. Tests demand recitation
of facts, papers require compilation of facts.
It is only natural, then, that the typical student sees college along these same lines.
Reinforced by the relation between elementary school, junior high, and high school, the
students usually believe that the relation between high school and college is the same as
that between junior high school and high school. They believe that the difference between
high school and college is that college courses are simply more difficult and that they are
more difficult because they present more difficult factual information; they examine more
difficult topics; they go over topics covered in high school but in a more detailed and
painstaking way. College is taken to be different from high school only in being more
difficult. Unfortunately this belief is reinforced by the actual content and method of
presentation of typical freshman courses and programs. For example, in the first semester a
freshman might take a course in English composition, a beginning physics course, a course
in a foreign language, and perhaps a lower-level survey course in social science or history.
These courses are often indistinguishable from high school courses.
New Types of Intellectual Work
At the same time, college freshmen sometimes suspect or expect that college is or should
be different in kind (not just in difficulty) from high school--that somehow intellectual
activity in college is or should be of a distinctly different and higher level. And this
expectation is fulfilled when the student gets beyond the introductory survey courses. There
the instructors do seem to expect something different in kind from the student, though
without telling the student explicitly and in detail what this is.
The good college teacher presents some information, in the sense of "what is currently
believed." But he also spends much time talking about the basis on which this information is

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currently believed. A large part of college work consists of discussing and examining the
basis of current beliefs.
The difference between high school and college is not that there is intellectual activity in one
and not in the other. The difference is that college work requires that students engage in a
different kind of intellectual activity, in addition to the activity of understanding the material
that is presented. The first type of intellectual activity in both high school and college is
understanding the material. Even here, though, college requires a different and higher type
of understanding, a type to be explained to some extent in later chapters of this book. Once
the material is understood, the college student must perform another sort of intellectual
work on the material, namely critical examination and evaluation. A main difference, then,
between high school and college is that new types of intellectual work are required at the
college level.
To see why new types of intellectual work are required, let's look again at the way in which
materials are presented in high school and college. In high school, they are presented in an
authoritative manner--almost as if they were absolutely and eternally true. This mode of
presentation is reinforced by the fact that the content that is presented in high school is,
typically, material about which people feel very, very sure. The laws of optics, the basic
facts of American history, the structure of a plant, the operation of the Federal Reserve
System--these are matters about which people feel great assurance, perhaps even
certainty. They can be presented on the basis of authority. They are not controversial. Of
course, we all know that once in a while, something about which we are very sure in this
way turns out to be false--or at least subject to revised beliefs. Nevertheless, revisions of
this sort are infrequent.
But in college a different attitude prevails toward the material being presented. Rather than
being treated as unchanging fact, it is treated as beliefs or conclusions that have been
reached on the basis of investigations.
At this point I must pause for a moment in order to talk about the kinds of statements that
I'm making here. I have made, and will make, statements that assert that college work has
such-and-such features or that college differs from high school in this or that way. And
some of you might find that in some of your courses, or indeed in your whole college career,
the work is not of this kind. In fact, some or all of your college work may seem not so
different from your experience in high school. This may, of course, be due to your
mistakenly approaching college work as if it were just the same as high school work. But I
must admit that some college work really is no different from high school work. So how can
I be justified in claiming so confidently that the two are different? My answer to this
depends on first making a certain important distinction, the distinction between a
descriptive statement and a normative statement. A descriptive statement tells how things
in fact are. A normative statement tells how things should be, regardless of how they in fact
are. If you say to me, "Things in my college are not the way you describe them," my reply
is that they should be the way I describe them. Thus, some of my statements look like
descriptive statements but they are to some extent normative statements too. My
statements on this topic are intended to describe the way things are at the best colleges
(not to be confused with the best-known colleges) and the way they should be in every
college. I admit that some college teachers treat their materials as if they were teaching
high school. And I admit that some exceptional high school teachers treat their materials in
a college manner. What I am trying to do is not so much describe what actually goes on in
the places called "high schools" and in the places called "colleges" as describe two different
types of work and then say that the more advanced work is what ought to be going on in

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colleges. Only this more advanced work ought to count as "higher education." So my
statements are partly descriptive (of the best teachers and the best colleges) and partly
normative (in claiming that this is what ought to go on in college).
Now let's return to the difference between high school and college just mentioned. I said
that in college materials are treated as beliefs or conclusions reached through investigation.
Modern people take a certain attitude toward beliefs, namely that if a person believes
something, he should have a basis for such beliefs. This can be put in the following way: it
is rational to believe something only if one has a basis for that belief. One basis is what we
call evidence. Most people today believe that, in secular or nonreligious matters at least,
one should have evidence for one's beliefs, that it is right to believe on the basis of evidence
and wrong to believe that for which there is not sufficient evidence. W. K. Clifford, a
nineteenth-century English mathematician and philosopher, put this point very directly
when he said: "It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon
insufficient evidence."1 Clifford puts this point with perhaps greater moral fervor than most
people would, but I think that no one would deny that he expresses a view that is quite
widespread in contemporary thought.
Material is presented in college not as something to be believed on the basis of authority
but as something to be believed because such belief is rationally justified and can be
rationally defended. Thus, much work in college--and, I would say, the work that is
characteristic of college--deals with the rational justification of belief. College teachers are
concerned not merely with imparting information but also, and mainly, to present and
examine the basis on which this information is or should be believed. They do this because
they want this material to be believed on the basis of reason rather than on the basis of
authority. It is a basic presupposition of the modern mind that rationally based belief is
better than belief based on authority, on faith, or on some other nonrational process. Thus,
much time in college is spent investigating the rationality of this or that belief.
It is important to notice that once we make this shift from authority to rational evaluation,
the mode of presentation of the material--and the way in which we regard the material-also changes. Material that is presented on the basis of authority is presented as factual and
is given an air of being absolutely and unchangeably true. Material that is presented on the
basis of rational justification is presented as belief, as theory, as hypothesis, sometimes as
conjecture--as material supported to a greater and lesser degree by argument and
evidence. And this difference in mode of presentation makes an enormous difference in how
the material is regarded. What is treated in high school as eternal and unchangeable fact
that human beings have discovered in their continual and relentless progress toward total
knowledge will be treated in college as belief that may perhaps be well supported at the
present but that could turn out to be wrong. Another way of putting this is: what is fact in
high school is often only theory--perhaps well-supported theory but nevertheless only
theory--in college. And theories must be treated as such: one must examine the evidence to
see how much support it gives the theory; and alternative theories must be examined to
see which is better, that is, to see which theory should be believed.
Basis of Belief
Why do we believe that beliefs should be rationally based? Is this belief itself rationally
based? Or is this belief itself merely an arbitrary presupposition or assumption? After all,
someone might claim that what matters about a belief is not whether it is rational but
instead whether it is true or false. If a belief is true, then it does not matter whether or not
it is held on a rational basis. A true belief that is irrational will be as effective in our lives as

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a true belief that is totally rational. Consider the following example. Suppose that a
businessman has been kidnapped and is being held for ransom. His wife has a dream in
which she sees her husband being held captive in an old warehouse by the harbor, and she
wakes believing that he is indeed there. At the same time, the chief of detectives has been
working all night on the case, gathering evidence, tracing the car used in the kidnapping,
questioning witnesses, and interviewing suspects. By daybreak the chief of detectives
comes to believe that the businessman is being held captive in that very same abandoned
warehouse. He and his men break into the warehouse and rescue the businessman. So it
turns out that the wife's belief is true and that the detective's belief is true, even though the
first is irrational and the second is rational. But what difference did the rationality or
irrationality of the belief make? If the police had followed up on the wife's belief instead of
the detective's belief, they would have gone to the same warehouse and rescued the
businessman anyway. This seems to show that it is the truth of the belief, not its rationality,
that matters.
This would be a good argument if our beliefs were always true and never false. But beliefs
can be false, and our problem is to separate the true from the false. What we must do is
find good reasons for believing what we believe. We think that if we base our beliefs on
good reasons, our beliefs will turn out to be true more often than false. The wife does have
a reason for believing that her husband is being held in the warehouse: she dreamed it was
so. But we believe that this is not a good reason because many of the things that we dream
turn out to be false. Dreaming does not, for most of us, provide a reliable guide to the truth.
Hence the wife's belief is considered by modern persons to be unjustified, that is, irrational.
But it is felt that evidence is a reliable guide to the truth, and that the more evidence we
have, the more we are justified in believing what we do believe.
Since college students are expected to believe on the basis of good reasons, they are
expected to know what those good reasons are. They are expected to know not only facts
but also the reasons those are believed to be facts. Therefore, much time in college is spent
in examining reasons to see if they are good reasons. For example, a high school text on
American history might state that Alexander Hamilton was one of the chief architects of our
Republic, that Hamilton's ideas were extremely influential in shaping our form of
government. A college teacher covering this period of American history would not let a
statement like this pass without examination--he would demand to know the reasons for
believing this claim to be true. This is, in part, why college courses beyond the initial survey
courses usually cover a small specialized topic: it takes time to examine and evaluate
reasons, to consider and discard alternative theories, to look at a theory from many sides
before deciding that the reasons are good enough to accept the theory.
So one question with which college work is concerned is the question: "What are the
reasons for believing this?" And the next question is: "Are these reasons good reasons for
believing this?" And for any particular belief about which this second question is asked, the
answer might turn out to be no. In that case, the belief is not justified--or, alternatively, we
are not justified in believing that. The answer might turn out to be no in the case of the
belief that Alexander Hamilton's ideas were influential in shaping this country's government.
"But," someone will say, "that's ridiculous. Of course Hamilton was influential. All the books
say so. Everyone believes it. And it's obvious." But is it so obvious? What are the reasons
for believing it? If Hamilton was influential, then we should be able to give good reasons for
believing that he was. And if we do not know of any reasons, or if the reasons are not good
reasons, then we should not believe that he was influential.

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My point here is that the business of college teaching and learning--namely the examination
of reasons for beliefs--gives rise to, encourages, and absolutely depends on both students
and teachers having an attitude of skepticism, of questioning, of not taking anything for
granted. The whole project of college teaching and research--indeed, the whole project of
the modern mind--is to base belief only on good reasons. Moderns feel that only this is
rational and legitimate. We have banished authority, superstition, magic, and prophecy as
bases for belief. We pride ourselves on rejecting these "primitive" and "emotional" reactions
to the world. We exalt reason. And what this means is that we attempt to base belief only
on good reasons. We are told that in the Middle Ages, people believed things because the
ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle said that they were true. They believed these things on
Aristotle's authority. This is now seen as illegitimate; instead, we should see for ourselves
whether things are true by gathering evidence and finding good reasons for ourselves.
Various tribes base some beliefs on the results of magical rites. We regard this as mere
superstition. The modern mind rejects all this. And college simply reflects this view about
the legitimation of belief by inquiring into the rationality of every belief to find out whether
each belief is supported by good reasons.
This view has extremely important consequences. Because every belief ought to be based
on good reasons, every belief must be examined. This includes even the most obvious
beliefs. In fact, it is especially important to examine those claims and beliefs that are most
obvious--it is precisely because something is "obvious" that people will not have examined
the reasons behind it. But it may turn out that any particular belief, even an "obvious"
belief, is unjustified. It may turn out that although we thought that there were good reasons
for that belief, when we take a hard look at the case, there are no good reasons for it.
College As a "Subversive" Institution
This questioning of everything, including the obvious, is the mission of college in carrying
out this project of modern intellectual life. And this sometimes has uncomfortable
consequences for colleges, college teachers, and college students. For this mission makes
the college potentially the most "subversive" institution in society. Here is an example. It
has been held as "obvious" by many people in our country that the American economic
system (a variety of capitalism) is superior to the Communist economic system. In college
one might well investigate this belief to see if it is backed up by good reasons. However,
merely raising and discussing this matter is likely to seem (and certainly has in the past
seemed) to large segments of the American people as sedition, as "anti-American," as a
betrayal of the trust of the American people in colleges and universities, as a lack of faith in
America. And in the past, college teachers have been threatened and punished for doing
just this sort of thing. College teachers have been fired from their jobs or made to sign
loyalty oaths because they have investigated such topics or have come to have unorthodox
views on such topics. The anti-Communist witchhunts of the 1950's, associated with the
name of Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.), included college teachers among their victims.
Here is another example. College teachers who investigated and taught about Darwinian
evolution were considered by powerful conservative segments of society to be undermining
established religion and were persecuted for this, when in fact they were only doing their
jobs, namely, inquiring into the reasons for a particular belief. Somewhat closer to our own
time, several academics have been threatened because they have proposed that intelligence
and social behavior are genetically determined. They have been prevented from speaking to
groups and have even occasionally been physically assaulted. Their views have been
condemned by liberals as politically dangerous. Thus, we find colleges under attack by both
liberals and conservatives. All of this was foreshadowed by the situation of Socrates, the
first person in recorded Western culture to have seriously examined the basis of common
and obvious beliefs. Socrates unceasingly questioned others to find out whether they had

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good reasons for their beliefs about such sensitive topics as justice, piety, and virtue. He
was finally accused of corrupting the youth and casting doubt on the gods, tried by the
Athenian people, and put to death. Inquiry into reasons for beliefs has sometimes been a
dangerous activity, from Socrates' time to the present, because the answer could always
turn out to be no, in which case some favorite or important beliefs are threatened.
This phenomenon is not limited to college teachers. It extends to college students
themselves. Many college students, after hearing and talking with their instructors and
other students, have gone home during vacations and questioned important beliefs that
they had formerly shared with their parents. They sometimes question their parents' way of
life ("How can you live in this expensive house and drive several cars while people in other
parts of the world are starving?"). Sometimes they question their parents' religious beliefs.
Tensions develop and fierce quarrels break out between parents and students over just this
kind of issue. So the basic attitude fostered by college--questioning of the reasons for
beliefs--does sometimes lead to uncomfortable situations, and both students and faculty
must be prepared to withstand this and to hold firm in carrying out the project of critical
inquiry. College is sometimes thought of as an "ivory tower," as somehow not part of "real"
life. But the strong emotions generated when favorite beliefs are questioned show that
college work has a direct connection with important aspects of "real" life. If college were
irrelevant to life, no one would care what was being done in colleges, and colleges would be
viewed with amused tolerance rather than with sometimes heated emotion, vituperation,
and outright assault.
When you inquire into the reasons for a belief, you may seem to be doubting that belief.
When you raise questions about the reasons for a belief, some people may take you to be
attacking that belief. We should distinguish here between two attitudes that one may take
toward a belief when investigating the reasons for it: doubting the belief, in the sense of
suspecting or believing that it is false; suspending the belief, in the sense of neither
believing it to be true nor believing it to be false. This second attitude is a neutral attitude
toward the belief and it maximizes the objectivity with which you pursue your inquiry into
the reasons behind the belief. In view of this distinction, we can see that to raise questions
about the reasons for a belief is not necessarily to attack it, since the questioner may have
the second attitude toward the belief instead of the first attitude. When you take this
attitude of suspension of belief toward a statement, you are no longer regarding that
statement as an expression of fact. For example, you no longer regard it as a fact that
Hamilton was influential in shaping our government. You are now investigating to see if the
reasons justify your taking the statement to express a fact. The statement expresses a
"claim," a "hypothesis," a "theory," or a "supposition." When this statement is found to be
supported by good reasons, then it may be said to express a fact.
Why Reasons Matter
Why is it that college work is so concerned with the reasons for our beliefs? I have already
briefly mentioned one reason for this: we hold that a belief that is supported by good
reasons is more likely to be true than one that is not supported by good reasons. You
should not, however, allow this justification of the search for good reasons to go
unchallenged and unexamined. Is it true that good reasons make truth more likely?
Someone may say that this connection between good reasons and likelihood of truth must
exist because a reason will count as a good reason only if its presence does produce a
greater likelihood of truth. This is what being a good reason is. But this response only shifts
the problem by raising a new and equally important question: what types of reasons
increase the likelihood of truth?

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There is a second, very different, justification of the search for good reasons. One could
form beliefs capriciously--that is, choose in an arbitrary manner to believe this or that. For
example, if you wanted to believe that you are the best figure skater in the world, you
would simply go ahead and believe it, ignoring all evidence. The trouble with forming one's
beliefs in this way is that eventually--and probably sooner rather than later--you will come
into frustrating, or even violent, contact with the real world. If you did believe that you were
the greatest figure skater in the world but weren't, you might demand special privileges for
yourself of the type often enjoyed by great artists. And you would be shocked and
frustrated when you did not get what you wanted. Basing beliefs on good reasons has been
found to aid in avoiding frustrations of this sort and to help in achieving one's goals. We
might call this a "pragmatic' justification of the search for good reasons. Beliefs based on
good reasons help us to get along better in the world.
A third justification is what we might call a "social" justification: basing beliefs on good
reasons fits together well with our democratic way of life. In a democracy, authority is
frowned upon as a basis for social decisions and social action. We do not believe in following
the orders of a dictator or a tyrant. Instead, we "reason together" to decide what ought to
be done. We try to persuade others that our position or view is the best; and we do this by
trying to show that our position is supported by the best reasons. When a zoning dispute
comes up in the city council, a new curriculum is proposed in the university, or an expansion
plan is discussed by a group of businessmen and women, each side tries to show that the
best reasons support its alternative. This is not to deny that other factors--personal
influence, threats, emotion, bribery--sometimes weigh heavily or even determine the final
decision. Nevertheless, our ideal--and often our practice--is to reason and to argue for or
against one side or the other in an attempt to reach the best decision. This is the way we
believe that we should relate to one another in society. Each person, we feel, ought to be
treated as a rational, independent judge, interested in doing what is right and capable of
being persuaded by argument. This democratic vision has nothing to do with whether beliefs
supported by good reasons are likely to be true. It has nothing to do with whether beliefs
supported by good reasons are more likely to be instrumental in the achievement of our
goals. Instead it has to do with the way in which we think about ourselves, the kinds of
persons we are or would like to become, and the ways in which we want to relate to and
interact with others in society. Basing belief on good reasons discovered in cooperative
discussion with others helps to make us the persons that we want to be and to produce the
type of society in which we want to live.
A fourth justification is to be found in the works of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato.
Plato's works take the form of dialogues between Socrates (who was Plato's teacher) and
others whom Socrates encountered in Athens. These dialogues have a question-and-answer
format, with Socrates asking the questions in a way that results in a critical examination
and evaluation of the beliefs of others on such important topics as justice, piety, and virtue.
In fact, Plato's dialogues are probably the single greatest influence in the formation of
Western rationality; any critical evaluation of Western rationality should begin with an
evaluation of Plato's view of the function of the intellect in living. In the Meno, a dialogue
about the nature of virtuous action, Socrates eventually poses the question: is true belief
equally as good, equally as valuable, as justified true belief (that is, true belief supported by
good reasons)? In other words, he poses the question: what difference does justification, or
support by good reasons, make? Isn't it enough to have true belief even if it is not
supported by good reasons? It appears to many people that true belief is as useful as
justified true belief, that justification by good reasons adds nothing, and so one need not
bother about justification. As Socrates put it: "Then true opinion is as good a guide to
correct action as knowledge ... right opinion is not less useful than knowledge."(1) To show
that this is wrong and that good reasons are important, Socrates begins with the story of

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the statues of Daedalus, which are so lifelike that they need to be fastened down to prevent
them from running away: they are not very valuable possessions if they are at liberty, for
they will walk off like runaway slaves; but when fastened, they are of great value, for they
are really beautiful works of art. Now this is an illustration of the nature of true opinions:
while they abide with us, they are fruitful and beautiful, but they run away out of the human
soul, and do not remain long, and therefore they are not of much value until they are
fastened by the tie of the cause ...
Socrates is saying here that if a person has a merely true belief without knowing the
justification of that belief, then he is not likely to have that belief for very long. A true belief
is of as much value as a justified true belief as long as you have the true belief. But the
trouble is that you are likely to change your mind about the merely true belief because you
do not know the reasons behind it. Thus, beliefs that are merely true and not also justified
are of little value because these beliefs do not stay around--you do not believe them--long
enough to be of value. For example, suppose you believe the maple is a deciduous tree
because someone told you this. This is a true belief. But you are accepting the belief merely
on the basis of authority; you do not know its justification; you do not know why you should
believe it. If someone else were to come along and tell you that the maple is not a
deciduous tree, you would probably not know whom to believe; you would feel that you no
longer knew what the truth was, and you would give up your belief that the maple is a
deciduous tree. You would no longer have this true belief, and thus this true belief could do
you no good at all. This is precisely the situation you are in if you believe things because
your high school or college teachers told you that they are true. Someone else might come
along and tell you something different, challenging your belief, and then you would not
know whom or what to believe. But if you know the grounds--the good reasons or
justification--for your beliefs, then when your belief is challenged, you can defend your
belief, not only to other people but to yourself too. You are therefore more likely to retain
your true beliefs when you know why you ought to hold them. You are in a good position to
evaluate and reject the justifications (if any) offered for other beliefs. Thus, justified true
belief turns out to be more useful to us than merely true belief because it stays with us
longer. We are more likely to continue to hold it.
Finally, there is a fifth and equally important justification of the search for good reasons.
Earlier I said that in high school, students are required to do a certain kind of intellectual
work, namely understanding the material presented. This is so in college, too. And the
investigation of reasons and arguments for a belief assists in understanding that belief. To
put this in a somewhat different way, if one does not know how to defend a belief, if one
does not know what counts as good reasons for a belief, then to that extent one does not
understand that belief. This is another of the lessons of the dialogues of Plato. In these
dialogues, Socrates, through adroit questioning, seems to cast grave doubt on the favorite
beliefs of other people. Many readers take Socrates to have shown in this way that these
beliefs of others are false. But in many cases this is not so. For it is also possible, even
likely, that these people do not defend their beliefs properly in the face of Socrates' probing
questions. And they do not defend them properly because they do not fully understand their
own beliefs. Thus, Socrates' questioning reveals others' lack of understanding rather than
falsity. If these people had understood their beliefs, they would have known what to say in
defense of those beliefs. Thus, one of Socrates' messages to us is this: it is as useless and
as dangerous to hold beliefs that may be true but which you do not understand as it is to
hold beliefs that are out-and-out false. By investigating reasons for our beliefs, we come to
understand them better.

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II
This Matter of Culture
(Chapter 1 from Think On These Things by J. Krishnamurti)
I WONDER IF we have ever asked ourselves what education means. Why do we go to
school, why do we learn various subjects, why do we pass examinations and compete with
each other for better grades? What does this so-called education mean, and what is it all
about? This is really a very important question, not only for the students, but also for the
parents, for the teachers, and for everyone who loves this earth. Why do we go through the
struggle to be educated? Is it merely in order to pass some examinations and get a job? Or
is it the function of education to prepare us while we are young to understand the whole
process of life? Having a job and earning one's livelihood is necessary - but is that all? Are
we being educated only for that? Surely, life is not merely a job, an occupation; life is
something extraordinarily wide and profound, it is a great mystery, a vast realm in which
we function as human beings. If we merely prepare ourselves to earn a livelihood, we shall
miss the whole point of life; and to understand life is much more important than merely to
prepare for examinations and become very proficient in mathematics, physics, or what you
will.
So, whether we are teachers or students, is it not important to ask ourselves why we are
educating or being educated? And what does life mean? Is not life an extraordinary thing?
The birds, the flowers, the flourishing trees, the heavens, the stars, the rivers and the fish
therein - all this is life. Life is the poor and the rich; life is the constant battle between
groups, races and nations; life is meditation; life is what we call religion, and it is also the
subtle, hidden things of the mind - the envies, the ambitions, the passions, the fears,
fulfilments and anxieties. All this and much more is life. But we generally prepare ourselves
to understand only one small corner of it. We pass certain examinations, find a job, get
married, have children, and then become more and more like machines. We remain fearful,
anxious, frightened of life. So, is it the function of education to help us understand the
whole process of life, or is it merely to prepare us for a vocation, for the best job we can
get?
What is going to happen to all of us when we grow to be men and women? Have you ever
asked yourselves what you are going to do when you grow up? In all likelihood you will get
married, and before you know where you are you will be mothers and fathers; and you will
then be tied to a job, or to the kitchen, in which you will gradually wither away. Is that all

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that your life is going to be? Have you ever asked yourselves this question? Should you not
ask it? If your family is wealthy you may have a fairly good position already assured, your
father may give you a comfortable job, or you may get richly married; but there also you
will decay, deteriorate. Do you see?
Surely, education has no meaning unless it helps you to understand the vast expanse of life
with all its subtleties, with its extraordinary beauty, its sorrows and joys. You may earn
degrees, you may have a series of letters after your name and land a very good job; but
then what? What is the point of it all if in the process your mind becomes dull, weary,
stupid? So, while you are young, must you not seek to find out what life is all about? And is
it not the true function of education to cultivate in you the intelligence which will try to find
the answer to all these problems? Do you know what intelligence is? It is the capacity,
surely, to think freely without fear, without a formula, so that you begin to discover for
yourself what is real, what is true; but if you are frightened you will never be intelligent.
Any form of ambition, spiritual or mundane, breeds anxiety, fear; therefore ambition does
not help to bring about a mind that is clear, simple, direct, and hence intelligent.
You know, it is really very important while you are young to live in an environment in which
there is no fear. Most of us, as we grow older, become frightened; we are afraid of living,
afraid of losing a job, afraid of tradition, afraid of what the neighbours, or what the wife or
husband would say, afraid of death. Most of us have fear in one form or another; and where
there is fear there is no intelligence. And is it not possible for all of us, while we are young,
to be in an environment where there is no fear but rather an atmosphere of freedom freedom, not just to do what we like, but to understand the whole process of living? Life is
really very beautiful, it is not this ugly thing that we have made of it; and you can
appreciate its richness, its depth, its extraordinary loveliness only when you revolt against
everything - against organized religion, against tradition, against the present rotten society
- so that you as a human being find out for yourself what is true. Not to imitate but to
discover - that is education, is it not? It is very easy to conform to what your society or your
parents and teachers tell you. That is a safe and easy way of existing; but that is not living,
because in it there is fear, decay, death. To live is to find out for yourself what is true, and
you can do this only when there is freedom, when there is continuous revolution inwardly,
within yourself.
But you are not encouraged to do this; no one tells you to question, to find out for yourself
what God is, because if you were to rebel you would become a danger to all that is false.

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Your parents and society want you to live safely, and you also want to live safely. Living
safely generally means living in imitation and therefore in fear. Surely, the function of
education is to help each one of us to live freely and without fear, is it not? And to create an
atmosphere in which there is no fear requires a great deal of thinking on your part as well
as on the part of the teacher, the educator.
Do you know what this means - what an extraordinary thing it would be to create an
atmosphere in which there is no fear? And we must create it, because we see that the world
is caught up in endless wars; it is guided by politicians who are always seeking power; it is
a world of lawyers, policemen and soldiers, of ambitious men and women all wanting
position and all fighting each other to get it. Then there are the so-called saints, the
religious gurus with their followers; they also want power, position, here or in the next life.
It is a mad world, completely confused, in which the communist is fighting the capitalist, the
socialist is resisting both, and everybody is against somebody, struggling to arrive at a safe
place, a position of power or comfort. The world is torn by conflicting beliefs, by caste and
class distinctions, by separative nationalities, by every form of stupidity and cruelty - and
this is the world you are being educated to fit into. You are encouraged to fit into the
framework of this disastrous society; your parents want you to do that, and you also want
to fit in.
Now, is it the function of education merely to help you to conform to the pattern of this
rotten social order, or is it to give you freedom - complete freedom to grow and create a
different society, a new world? We want to have this freedom, not in the future, but now,
otherwise we may all be destroyed. We must create immediately an atmosphere of freedom
so that you can live and find out for yourselves what is true, so that you become intelligent,
so that you are able to face the world and understand it, not just conform to it, so that
inwardly, deeply, psychologically you are in constant revolt; because it is only those who
are in constant revolt that discover what is true, not the man who conforms, who follows
some tradition. It is only when you are constantly inquiring, constantly observing,
constantly learning, that you find truth, God, or love; and you cannot inquire, observe,
learn, you cannot be deeply aware, if you are afraid. So the function of education, surely, is
to eradicate, inwardly as well as outwardly, this fear that destroys human thought, human
relationship and love.

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III
Afrocentricity
By Dr. Molefi Kete Asante
Published 4/13/2009
Afrocentricity is a paradigm based on the idea that African people should re-assert a sense
of agency in order to achieve sanity. During the l960s a group of African American
intellectuals in the newly-formed Black Studies departments at universities began to
formulate novel ways of analyzing information. In some cases, these new ways were called
looking at information from a black perspective as opposed to what had been considered
the white perspective of most information in the American academy.
In the late l970s Molefi Kete Asante began speaking of the need for an Afrocentric
orientation to data. By l980 he had published a book, Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social
Change, which launched the first full discussion of the concept. Although the word existed
before Asantes book and had been used by many people, including Asante in the l970s, and
Kwame Nkrumah in the l960s, the intellectual idea did not have substance as a philosophical
concept until l980.
The Afrocentric paradigm is a revolutionary shift in thinking proposed as a constructural
adjustment to black disorientation, decenteredness, and lack of agency. The Afrocentrist
asks the question, What would African people do if there were no white people? In other
words, what natural responses would occur in the relationships, attitudes toward the
environment, kinship patterns, preferences for colors, type of religion, and historical
referent points for African people if there had not been any intervention of colonialism or
enslavement? Afrocentricity answers this question by asserting the central role of the
African subject within the context of African history, thereby removing Europe from the
center of the African reality. In this way, Afrocentricity becomes a revolutionary idea
because it studies ideas, concepts, events, personalities, and political and economic
processes from a standpoint of black people as subjects and not as objects, basing all
knowledge on the authentic interrogation of location.
So that it becomes legitmate to ask, Where is the sistah coming from? or Where is the
brotha at? Are you down with overcoming oppression? These are assessment and
evaluative questions that allow the interrogator to accurately pinpoint the responders

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location, whether it be a cultural or psychological location. As a paradigm Afrocentricity

enthrones the centrality of the African, that is, black ideals and values, as expressed in the
highest forms of African culture, and activates consciousness as a functional aspect of any
revolutionary approach to phenomena. The cognitive and structural aspects of a paradigm
are incomplete without the functional aspect. There is something more than knowing in the
Afrocentric sense; there is also doing. Afrocentricity holds that all definitions are
autobiographical.
One of the key assumptions of the Afrocentrist is that all relationships are based on centers
and margins and the distances from either the center or the margin. When black people
view themselves as centered and central in their own history then they see themselves as
agents, actors, and participants rather than as marginals on the periphery of political or
economic experience. Using this paradigm, human beings have discovered that all
phenomena are expressed in the fundamental categories of space and time. Furthermore, it
is then understood that relationships develop and knowledge increases to the extent we are
able to appreciate the issues of space and time.
The Afrocentric scholar or practitioner knows that one way to express Afrocentricity is called
marking. Whenever a person delineates a cultural boundary around a particular cultural
space in human time, this is called marking. It might be done with the announcement of a
certain symbol, the creation of a special bonding, or the citing of personal heroes of African
history and culture. Beyond citing the revolutionary thinkers in our history, that is, beyond
Amilcar Cabral, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X and Nkrumah, we must be prepared to act upon
our interpretation of what is in the best interest of black people, that is, black people as an
historically oppressed population. This is the fundamental necessity for advancing the
political process.
Afrocentricity is the substance of our regeneration because it is in line with what
contemporary philosophers Haki Madhubuti and Maulana Karenga, among others, have
articulated as in the best image and interest of African people. What is any better than
operating and acting out of our own collective interest? What is any greater than seeing the
world through our eyes? What resonates more with people than understanding that we are
central to our history, not someone elses? If we can, in the process of materializing our
consciousness, claim space as agents of progressive change, then we can change our
condition and change the world.
Afrocentricity maintains that one can claim this space only if one knows the general
characteristics of Afrocentricity as well as the practical applications of the field.

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There are five general characteristics of the Afrocentric Method

1. The Afrocentric method considers that no phenomena can be apprehended
adequately without locating it first. A phenom must be studied and analyzed in
relationship to psychological time and space. It must always be located. This is the
only way to investigate the complex interrelationships of science and art, design and
execution, creation and maintenance, generation and tradition, and other areas
bypassed by theory.
2. The Afrocentric method considers phenomena to be diverse, dynamic, and in motion
and therefore it is necessary for a person to accurately note and record the location
of phenomena even in the midst of fluctuations. This means that the investigator
must know where he or she is standing in the process.
3. The Afrocentric method is a form of cultural criticism that examines etymological
uses of words and terms in order to know the source of an authors location. This
allows us to intersect ideas with actions and actions with ideas on the basis of what
is pejorative and ineffective and what is creative and transformative at the political
and economic levels.
4. The Afrocentric method seeks to uncover the masks behind the rhetoric of power,
privilege, and position in order to establish how principal myths create place. The
method enthrones critical reflection that reveals the perception of monolithic power
as nothing but the projection of a cadre of adventurers.
5. The Afrocentric method locates the imaginative structure of a system of economics,
bureau of politics, policy of government, expression of cultural form in the attitude,
direction, and language of the phenom, be it text, institution, personality,
interaction, or event.
Analytic Afrocentricity
Analytic Afrocentricity is the application of the principles of the Afrocentric method to textual
analysis. An Afrocentrist seeks to understand the principles of the Afrocentric method in
order to use them as a guide in analysis and discourse. It goes without saying that the
Afrocentrist cannot function properly as a scientist or humanist if he or she does not
adequately locate the phenom in time and space. This means that chronology is as
important in some situations as location. The two aspects of analysis are central to any
proper understanding of society, history, or personality.

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Inasmuch as phenoms are active, dynamic, and diverse in our society, the Afrocentric
method requires the scientists to focus on accurate notations and recording of space and
time. In fact, the best way to apprehend location of a text is to determine where the
researcher is located in time and space first. Once you know the location and time of the
researcher or author it is fairly easy to establish the parameters for the phenom itself. The
value of etymology, that is, the origin of terms and words is in the proper identification and
location of concepts. The Afrocentrist seeks to demonstrate clarity by exposing dislocations,
disorientations, and decenterness. One of the simplest ways of accessing textual clarity is
through etymology.

Myths tie all relationships together, whether personal or conceptual. It is the Afrocentrists
task to determine to what extent the myths of society are represented as being central to or
marginal to society. This means that any textual analysis must involve the concrete realities
of lived experiences, thus making historical experiences a key element in analytica
Afrocentricity. In examining attitude, direction, and language the Afrocentrist is seeking to
uncover the imagination of the author. What one seeks to do is to create an opportunity for
the writer to show where he or she stands in relationship to the subject. Is the writer
centered or is the writer marginalized within his own story?
Afrocentric Philosophy
The philosophy of Afrocentricity as expounded by Molefi Kete Asante and Ama Mazama,
central figures of the Temple School, is a way of answering all cultural, economic, political,
and social questions related to African people from a centered position. There are other
Afrocentric ideas as well but these are the ones propounded in texts by Professors Asante,
Mazama, and the late C. Tsehloane Keto. Indeed, Afrocentricity cannot be reconciled to any
hegemonic or idealistic philosophy. It is opposed to radical individualism as expressed in the
postmodern school. But it is also opposed to spookism, confusion, and superstition. As
example of the differences between the methods of Afrocentricity and postmodernism,
consider the following question, Why have Africans been shut out of global development?
The postmodernist would begin by saying that there is no such thing as Africans because
there are many different types of Africans and all Africans are not equal. The postmodernist
would go on to say that if there were Africans and if the conditions were as described by the
querist then the answer would be that Africans had not fully developed their own capacities
in relationship to the global economy and therefore they are outside of the normal

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development patterns of the world economy. On the other hand, the Afrocentrist does not
question the fact that there is a collective sense of Africanity revealed in the common
experiences of the African world. The Afrocentrist would look to the questions of location,
control of the hegemonic global economy, marginalization, and power positions as keys to
understand the underdevelopment of African people.
Major Works:
Molefi Kete Asante, The Afrocentric Idea. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998.
Ama Mazama, ed., The Afrocentric Paradigm. Trenton: Africa World Press, 2003
Posted by Molefi Kete Asante

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IV
Afrika South of the Sahara
(Speech By Mwalimu Julius Nyerere: Cape Town, South Afrika 16 OCTOBER 1997)
Madam Speaker and, I think I may say, Comrade President and Comrade Vice President,
ladies and gentlemen. I have told you already how I felt when you asked me to come and
talk here. And then I got the message that you were coming. Of course, I am happy you are
here, but what do I say in your presence in this House? This is not my first time here. I
have been here before and I have thanked you, but I must thank you again. For me to
come here to this Chamber and address you is a dream which you have helped me to make
true. How could any one of us have thought that it would be possible for me or people of my
type to come to this country and speak from a forum like this? So, Mr. President, and all
your colleagues, I say thank you very much for making this possible.
Now, as for sharing my thoughts with you: my thoughts, unfortunately, don't change, so a
lot of what I am going to say some of you will have heard before, but some of you have not.
I am going to say two things about Africa. One, that Africa south of the Sahara is an
isolated region of the world. That's the first thing I want to say. The second thing I want to
say is that Africa south of the Sahara is not what it is believed to be because Africa is now
changing. So let me see if I can share those thoughts with you in a very short period.
Africa south of the Sahara is an isolated region of the world. During the last ten years, since
my retirement as head of state of my country, I was asked, and I agreed, to establish
something called the South Commission. That has meant a lot of travelling. I have been
many times to Latin America, many times to Asia, many times to many parts of Africa
before coming here, and many times to a large number of countries in Europe.
The world is changing. It is not only Africa which is changing. The world is changing. Of the
three big power blocs developing in the world since the end of the Cold War, one -- the
obvious one - is the United States. It has always been there. The United States is building
around it a group of other countries. That is the obvious area of power. It is the one which
is very clear. Another is Europe, which is also an obvious power bloc. The third is Japan and
the areas of Asia around it.

The US has neighbours. One of them is Mexico, from the Third World. A President of Mexico
is reported to have said once -- this is a president of the country -- "Poor Mexico! So far
from God, and so near to the United States!" When he said that, what Mexicans were
reaping were the disadvantages of being close to the United States. They were not getting
any advantages at all from being so close to the United States.
The US is reach and there is a kind of osmosis- a political osmosis, but I think also an
economic osmosis. The economy of the US pulls people from Mexico into the United States.
The US has been trying very hard to stop these poor Mexicans from getting into the US, but
without success. They spend a lot of money on the border, and have a lot of police there. I
don't know whether they have electric fences and other things to try to prevent Mexicans
going to the US, but they can't succeed. They have not succeeded. Mexicans keep pouring
into the United States.
The United States had decided to change its policy. They have invited Mexico to join NAFTA,

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and now they are working together to create jobs in Mexico to prevent poor Mexicans from
looking for jobs in the United States. I think they will succeed and Mexicans will now want to
remain in Mexico. Some will still want to go to the United States, but the flood can be
stemmed. There will not be a flood of Mexicans going to the United States.
What is happening between Mexico and the US is happening in Europe. Europe is a
powerhouse -- not a political powerhouse or even a military power house like the US, but an
economic powerhouse, and one of these days, I think, they are actually going to be a bigger
powerhouse than USA. They are a power and are attracting people: again there is osmosis
there, the economic osmosis. Who are pulled there? East Europeans are pulled towards
Europe.
But the others who are pulled towards the economic power are from Mediterranean Africa,
Africa north of the Sahara. That is why I was talking about Africa south of the Sahara being
the isolated region in the world. So Eastern Europe and Mediterranean Africa are to Europe
what Mexico is to the US.
Geography, the logic of geography, means that if you have problems of unemployment in
Eastern Europe, East Europeans will want to move into Western Europe. The Germans know
it, and others know it. They will try to keep them out. They will not try to keep them out by
building fences or putting up another wall. They will try to help East Europeans to stay at
home by creating jobs in Eastern Europe, and they are already doing that. They will do the
same with regard to the Africans of North Africa.
So Europe has a policy with regard to the countries of North Africa -- not simply an
economic policy, but actually a security policy. The French, the Italians, the Portuguese, the
Spaniards -- those are the ones in particular who are frightened of a flood of unemployment
from North Africa into Europe. And some, of course, are afraid not only of the unemployed.
Some think they don't like the export of Islamic fundamentalism into Europe. But I think
that's a minor problem. The real problem is unemployment, people moving into Europe from
North Africa. Europe has a plan. They can't just sit there and watch this happening.
European countries will have to work together to help the countries of North Africa to create
jobs.
The other bloc is Japan. Japan is small, Japan is wealthy, Japan doesn't like other people
going to Japan. They don't like that. But they are a big trading nation and they are pouring
a lot of money into Asia, and I think they'll do it in China also. I don't think they'll be
frightened of China. They'll put money in China.
So there are those three blocs of countries, three power blocs -- power developing in Asia,
power developing in North America, power developing in Europe- and those countries which
are geographically in the orbit of those areas. These rich areas are being forced to help the
countries which are near them.
Africa south of the Sahara is different - completely different. It's not in the orbit of any of
those big areas. If you people here are unemployed, very few of you will want to go to the
US. The unemployed here will stay here. But so will unemployed in Tanzania. We'll not go to
the US. We'll not go Europe. Certainly we'd never dream of going to Japan or anywhere
else. A trickle will go out -- the stowaways. But there is no answer to our unemployment in
running away from where we are. And if you try it, it won't work.
So the USA is not frightened of unemployment in Africa south of the Sahara. It's your
problem. It's not their problem. They will not do here or in Tanzania or in Nigeria, what they

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are doing about Mexico. No, it's not a problem for them, and it's not a problem for Europe
either. Europe has a problem arising from Algeria, yes, or even from Egypt, from that part
of the world. But from Africa south of the Sahara? No, they've no fear of a problem there.
There is no flood of unemployed moving from this area going to Europe to seek jobs. So
what would be the imperative from Europe? What pressure has Europe to deal with you
people, unless you create some very attractive means of attracting a few business people?
And in Asia, the Japanese are afraid that if they don't share their wealth with some of the
poor, these poor might come to Japan. Those poor are not the African poor from this part of
the world. They are from Asia.
So that is the first thing I wanted to say about Africa south of the Sahara. You are isolated
from the centres of power. There is no internal urge in the US, in Europe or in Japan to help
Africa. None. And, I think, to some extent the urge of imperialism has gone. So you could
easily be forgotten. Africa is of interest when we are killing one another. Then we arouse a
lot of interest. The big news now in Europe and North America is not here. It's in Congo
Brazzaville; Congo Brazzaville is now big news. The television screens are full of what is
happening in Congo Brazzaville. That's news. And won't last for long. It might last until the
end of this week, then it's out. And then, if Africa wants to appear on European television,
we can cause more trouble somewhere, I think I've made that point.
Africa south of the Sahara is isolated. Africa south of the Sahara, in the world today, is on
its own -- totally on its own. That's the first thing I wanted to say. The second thing I
wanted to say is that Africa is changing. I've been to Europe, Asia, North America and Latin
America, and Africa is a stereotype. The Africa which now arouses some interest is the
Brazzaville Africa, that Rwanda Africa, that Somalia Africa, that Liberia Africa. That is the
Africa which arouses interest, and I don't blame these people. That's the Africa that they
know.
And so I go out. I come from Tanzania, and we don't have these blessed troubles that they
have in other places, but I go out. Sometimes I get annoyed, but sometimes I don't get
annoyed. Here I am a former president of my country. There are no problems in Tanzania -we have never had these problems that they have -- but I'm an African. So when they see
me they ask about the problems of Rwanda. I say, "I don't come from Rwanda." And they
answer, "But you come from Africa" But if Blair were to come to Dar es Salaam, I wouldn't
ask him what is happening in Bosnia. If I meet President Kohi somewhere. I don't ask him,
"what is happening in Chechnya? Kohi could say, "Why are you asking about Chechnya? I
don't know hat is happening in Chechnya."
But this is not true about Africa. Mr. President, here you are trying to build something which
is a tremendous experience, but perhaps you are different. Sometimes they think South
Africa is different, so perhaps they would say, "This is President Mandela, this is different."
But for the likes of me, no, I am an African. And sometimes I get irritated, but then I say,
"Why? Why do I get irritated?" Because, of course, I am a Tanzanian.
But what is this Tanzania? Why should these Europeans see me as a Tanzanian? What is
this Tanzania? This is something we tried to create in my lifetime. I built Tanzania. So what
is this Tanzania? The Europeans are right. The North Americans are right to look at me as
an African, not as a Tanzanian, because Tanzania is a creation of colonialism, which is
causing us a lot of trouble on the continent.
So, to some extent, Europeans are right when they choose to see us in this differentiated
manner. The Tanzania here is a president of Tanzania. He struggled there for 23 years

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before he stepped down to try and turn those 125 tribes into some kind of nation, and he
has succeeded to some extent. This is what I want them to think of. Why? They see me
correctly as an African. So that is where I want to end. This is the other thing I really
wanted to say.
Africa South of the Sahara is isolated, Africa south of the Sahara is changing. That
stereotype of "There is trouble in Africa all the time" is nonsensical. There is trouble in
Africa, there is trouble in Asia, there is trouble in Europe, there is trouble everywhere, and it
would be amazing if after the suffering of the blessed continent for the last 100 years, we
didn't have what we are having. Some of these nations we have are not nations at all. They
make no sense at all, any geographical sense or ethnic sense or economic sense. They
don't. The Europeans set somewhere and said, "you take that part, you take that part."
They drew these lines on a map and here we are, trying to create nations which are almost
impossible to create. But we are changing. The continent is changing.
My friend who was introducing me mentioned neocolonialism. I'm glad you still use the word
"neocolonialism", because, you know. We went through a period when some of our people
thought we were so advanced now to talk about neocolonialism. Uh-uh, no, no. It is almost
communist to talk about neocolonialism. He is a communist? Well, I am not a communist,
but I agree with you! We went through a neocolonial period in Africa. It nearly destroyed all
the hopes of the struggle for the liberation of the continent, with a bunch of soldiers taking
over power all over the continent, pushed, instigated and assisted by the people who talk
about this stereotype of Africa.
We have just got rid of Mobutu, who put him there? I don't know what Lumumba would
have been if he had been allowed to live. I don't know. He was an elected leader, but
angered the powerful and they removed him within weeks. Then Mobutu came on the scene
within weeks and he's been there since. He was the worst of the lot. He loots the country,
he goes out, and he leaves that country with a debt of US$14 billion.
That money has done nothing for the people of Congo. So I sit down with friends of the
World Bank and IMF. I say, "You know where that money is. Are you going to ask Kabila to
tax the poor Congolese to pay that money? That would be a crime. It's criminal." And that
was the type of leadership we had over a large part of Africa. They were leaders put there
either by the French or by the Americans. When we had the Cold War, boy, I tell you, we
couldn't breathe.
But Africa is changing. You can make a map of Africa and just look at the countries
stretching from Eritrea to here. Just draw a line and see all those countries. You still have a
Somalia and a Burundi there, but it's a very different kind of Africa now, it has elected
governments, it has confident governments. Actually, most of those countries with the
exception of Uganda, have never been under military rule. Never! And since your coming
onto the scene, this is completely different kind of Africa.
When we were struggling here, South Africa still under apartheid, and you being a
destabiliser of your neighbours instead of working together with them to develop our
continent, of course that was a different thing. It was a terrible thing. Here was a powerful
South Africa, and this power was a curse to us. It was not a blessing for us. We wished it
away, because it was not a blessing at all. It destroyed Angola with a combination of
apartheid; it was a menace to Mozambique and a menace to its neighbours, but that has
changed. South Africa is democratic. South Africa is no longer trying to destroy the others.
South Africa is now working with the others. And, boy please work with the others!

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And don't accept this nonsense that South Africa is big brother. My brother, you can't be big
brother. What is your per capita income? Your per capita income is about US$3,000 a year.
Of course compared with Tanzania you are a giant. But you are poor. When you begin to
use that money this is arithmetic, simple arithmetic and if you divide the wealth of this
country for the population, of course everybody gets US$3, 000, but not everybody in this
country is getting US$ 3,000. That would be a miracle. That is simply arithmetic.
So when you begin to use that wealth, Mr. President and I know you are trying to address
the legacy of apartheid -- you have no money. You are still different from Tanzania, but you
have no money. You are still more powerful. So Tanzania and the others to say that South
Africa is big brother, and they must not throw their weight around, what kind of weight is
that? And, in any case, this would be positive weight, not the negative weight of apartheid.
So this is a different Africa. I am saying that this Africa now is changing. Neocolonialism is
being fought more effectively, I think, with a new leadership in Africa. And I believe the one
region which can lead this fight is our region. With the end of apartheid and South Africa
having joined SADC, this area of Africa is a very solid area. It is an extremely solid area. It
is strong, it has serious leaders and these leaders know one another. I know that because
where some of them have come from, They have a habit of working together, Mr. President,
so let them work together. Deliberately. It should be a serious decision to work together.
Why? You have no other choice. You have absolutely no other choice.
South Africa, because of its infrastructure, can attract more investment from Europe, from
North America, than Tanzania can. Fine, go ahead. Do it, use your capacity to get as much
investment as you can. That's good. But then don't be isolated from the rest of Africa. What
you build here because of your infrastructure and the relative strength of your economy,
you are building for all of us here.
The power that Germany has is European power, and the Europeans are moving together.
The small and the big are working together. It is absurd for Africa to think that we, these
little countries of Africa, can do it alone. Belgium has 10 million people. Africa south of the
Sahara if you exclude South Africa has 470 million Africans, I sit down with the Prime
Minister of Belgium, and he talks to me about European unity. I say, "You are small, your
country is very small, so how can you talk of European unity with giants like Germany and
the others? He says, "This question of the protection of our sovereignty we leave to the big
powers. We lost our sovereignty ages ago."
These countries are old, their sovereignty is old. These Europeans fought wars. When we
were studying history, it was the history of the wars of Europe. They fought and fought, and
they called their wars World Wars. But now I can't imagine Europeans fighting. No, war in
Europe is an endangered species. I think it's gone, certainly war between one country and
another. The internal problems you will still have, the problem of the Balkans, but that is a
reflection of something that is like Africa.
So I'm saying that Africa is changing because the leadership in Africa is changing. Africa is
beginning to realise and we should all encourage Africa to get that realisation more and
more that we have to depend upon ourselves, both at national level and at the collective
level. Each of our countries will have to rely upon its own human resources and natural
material resources for its development. But that is not enough. The next area to look at is
our collectivity, our working together. We all enhance our capacity to develop if we work
together.

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V
The Chinweizu Interview: "Its a War for the African mind"
Thursday, 01 December 2005
Chinweizu in conversation with James Eze
Q: Sir I hope you dont mind my recording this conversation. Some of the things
you have already said so far are too exciting for a reporter to pass up.
A : Does this mean that without a tape recorder you cannot do a summary description of a
conversation an hour later? If you cant do that, you couldnt have been a journalist in Ziks
time because there was no tape recorder then. Cant you be at a meeting and report the
proceedings later if it is so crowded that you couldnt bring out pen and paper to write?
Q: As a matter of fact I could and I have indeed done it many times before. I dont
know if it would sound immodest to say that I also have a good memory. The fact
is that I consider meeting you a privilege and I wouldnt want to summarize what
you have to say but to have it in a format that will make reference to it at a later
time possible. I also would like to take direct quotes from you and I wouldnt want
to quote you out of context or paraphrase your statements in a manner that robs
them of the vital punch lines.
A: Ive heard you. The point is, we are discussing a general institutional failure. You yourself
can have the best memory in the world, you can still do very good work, but as an
institution, something is not being cultivated. And that is the point. The journalism
profession in Nigeria today, and probably in most of the world, has deviated from the craft
tradition where you are trained on the job. That great tradition is lost and with it a lot of
knowledge of how to do things. Now, you rely on Mass Comm Departments to train
journalists, but there's no substitute for learning on the job. Most farmers can still farm
because they learn it on the job, because they go through the nitty-gritty under the
observation of the elders; and the elders will explain and tell them when they are not doing
anything right. Training is based ultimately not on lectures but on that practical hands-on
context. Engineers are trained in universities, but most industries regard fresh graduates as
raw material. They have the theory, they have the general information, but when they get
to the factory floor they have to really bend down and pick up some practical knowledge.
Q: But does that necessarily imply that the design of our education system may
have left out some vital loose ends?

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A: Do you have an education system?

Q: Well, we have a system in place at the moment even if it does not qualify as an
education system.
A: You have what you dignify by calling it an education system.
Q: Well, its perhaps because some of us are products of this system and may not
have had the good fortune of knowing how other systems work.
A: Well, the argument is not with you but with those who maintain the system and call it an
education system. An education system trains somebody to live in a particular society.
That's what every proper education system does. As somebody recently said in a book: A
Chaga with the education of an Eskimo is, from the point of view of his society, uneducated,
as he would be were he to have been exclusively educated in a Western school or
university. Now, if you take an Eskimo who lives in his environment, his ecosystem, and
give him the training of an Englishman who lives in a different environment, is that
education? You train him to live in English society but he is not going to live in English
society. In Eskimo society, he cannot fit in because he has a wrong mentality; his attitude,
his notion of his ecosystem and how to exploit it are all wrong. So, he is not educated. He
cannot function effectively in Eskimo society because you trained him for English society,
which is in a different ecosystem. What we practice here is some version of the English
education system. You see the students in all these schools with their jackets and blazers,
especially these new ones in Lekki and V.I. What are they being trained to be? What society
will they operate in when they graduate? Not English society, not American society but
Nigerian society. And they are not being trained to function in Nigerian society or
ecosystem. Start with language. Language is critical in any culture. So when you train
people in a language that is not the language of their culture, you have not trained them for
their culture. This is a very large issue, actually, but the point is that what we call our
education system here is basically a miseducation system. We are miseducating our children
by trying to train them as if they are going to live in the industrialized society of England ,
with the traditions of England and among people who think and behave as the English
people do. But that's not the society they are going into. So, on the premise that an
education system trains people to live in their own society and ecosystem, what we have
here is a miseducation system. Its all crap! People think they are doing a great thing here:
They give birth to a child and hand it over to an alien education system and expect that at
the end of 20 or 30 years he would come back to be part of them. It can't be, because they
have molded him differently, alienated him from his culture.

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Q: How can a good education system be designed? What are the standards in
other societies?
A: The standards in other societies should not interest you because they were designed for
their own peculiar purposes. You have to ask yourself what kind of training you need in your
own society, and then invent a system to provide it. It's not something you copy; it's
something you invent. You have to know what you want, what kind of society you want the
products to live in. If you haven't worked out all those things, then you haven't started,
because it's only when you know the purpose for which you plan to train the next
generation that you can invent an education system that will serve your purpose.
For a century now, we have not been educating our people for our society and its
ecosystem. It started when the British conquered us. So, it's a great error that has been
perpetuated for a century or more. We don't even train people to speak our languages. Here
we are, holding this discussion in English. It's not your fault or mine. I am just pointing out
the cumulative effect of a century of misdirection. It was not the fault of our ancestors
directly because somebody conquered them and imposed an alien and alienating system on
them. The white people trained people here because they needed clerks to help them
exploit us. That's why they brought their schools. They didn't bring their schools to help us
survive. The people who designed the present system did not do so in our interest. They
came here to destroy us. And some of the structures they brought in, we have foolishly
adopted as our own and we can't see beyond our noses to realize that what they have given
us is poison, and that we should throw it out and find something else. We haven't reached
that stage in our understanding of our situation. So, we perpetuate the ruinous system the
British left behind.
Q: This miseducation, as you rightly pointed out, has been going on for over a
century. So, when shall we wake up to its disturbing reality?
A : Well, it's not in the hands of any other people; it's in our own hands. The world is
moving on. It is when we want to wake up from our slumber that we will wake up. Fela, in
one of his songs, told us what to do. He reminded us that, as in other lands, it is the culture
of our people that our schools should teach. That's the basic need. But was he heeded? We
blacks haven't understood that this our imported way of living isn't a good way. Until we
find that out, we'll keep messing up. But, as usual, we don't ask ourselves the
fundamentals. Take this matter of education, which is our gloss of Igbo ozuzu. In contrast
to this education, which is a process of book learning and Europeanization, ozuzu was the
process of socializing a child into the Igbo way of life, so he became an adult equipped to
behave in the Igbo way, rather than the Eskimo way, the European way or some other non-

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Igbo way, or even like a wild animal! Unlike this education, ozuzu was specific and
appropriate to a cultural context, the Igbo context. It aimed to produce, not just any kind of
educated person, but an Igbo person, a well-behaved Igbo person, suffused with the Igbo
worldview, and living by the Igbo code of conduct. And I am sure that every other precolonial African society had its own equivalent of Igbo ozuzu, an equivalent that was
appropriate to its own specific culture. To get back to your point about our waking up, we
shall continue on our present ruinous way until we wake up and retrace our steps to our
ancestral system of culturally appropriate education, and then develop it. The pertinent
question to ask is not how other societies educate but how did our ancestors socialize and
acculturate their children for their environment? The answer does not lie in copying how
other societies conduct their own training. There's so much to learn from what our ancestors
did. If we find out how we did it in ancient times, we can then adapt from it and make a
new version that will serve our new situation. What they did is still relevant. After all, we
still live in the same ecosystem as they did. And they mastered how to live in it, which is
why we have survived so far. And we should gratefully use their legacy to our benefit.
Q: Now, talking about our ancestors, you are a distinguished black scholar. How
valid is the claim that Greek civilization had its origins in Africa , particularly Egypt
? And also how true is the claim that these ancient Egyptians from whom the
Greeks borrowed the now famous European model of civilization were actually
black?
A: The long and short of it is that the ancient Egyptians, those who built the pyramids and
all of Pharaonic civilization were black; and they played a central role in the formation of
Greek culture. The evidence of that is abundant. Pythagoras, Orpheus, Homer, Thales,
Lycurgus, Solon, Plato, Eudoxus and other famous Greeks that founded the various aspects
of Greek civilization went to Egypt to learn. Much of what is propagated as Greek philosophy
and Greek knowledge were things they learnt when they went to Egypt to study. There are
books on that. Here, for instance, is Onyewuenyi's book on that (produces a copy of Prof.
Onyewuenyi's The African Origins of Greek Philosophy: An exercise in Afrocentrism).
Furthermore, Egyptian influence on Greek civilization was not exerted only through students
who took Egyptian learning back to Greece . In addition, by ancient Greek accounts, settlers
from Egypt and Phoenicia had, much earlier, either founded or supplied ruling dynasties to
such Greek cities as Thebes , Argos , Sparta and Athens . Athens is actually named after an
Ancient Egyptian city Sais which was reportedly also called Athenai; and the Greek goddess
Athena is a version of the goddess Neith of the Egyptian Sais/Athenai. In addition, many
Greek words, (about 25% of the Greek vocabulary, by some expert estimates) are derived
from Ancient Egyptian. Greek place names that were derived from Egyptian words testify to

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what the ancient Greeks themselves said: that Egyptians had colonized Greece in remote
times and taught civilization to the Greeks. They also said that Greek religion, including its
oracles and mystery rites, was introduced from Egypt . A good popular account of all this is
given in the book Black Spark, White Fire by Richard Poe. If the specialist argument
interests you, you can look it up in the multi-volume work Black Athena by Martin Bernal.
On the matter of the color of the Ancient Egyptians, Herodotus, whom the Europeans call
the father of history, said that the Egyptians were black. In fact Cheikh Anta Diop has an
essay, Origin of the Ancient Egyptians, in which he quoted about ten of those Greek and
Roman writers who lived during the first six centuries after the whites had overrun Egypt .
They all say that the ancient Egyptians were black. People who went there and saw them
with their own eyes, said that the ancient Egyptians were black. They were still a black
population even centuries after whites had overrun them. In contrast, those claiming today
that the Ancient Egyptians were not black have not produced even one ancient eyewitness
report that says the Egyptians were anything other than black.
The bottom line is that Ancient Greek civilization was a daughter of Egypt ; and that the
Ancient Egyptians were blacks. The white boys now pretend that the Ancient Egyptian
civilization was created by white people and that it did not spawn Greek civilization. They
are lying about all that and they have been doing so for the last three centuries. Their
ancestors knew differently. The Greeks themselves said differently. So, even if you don't
believe what anybody else says, there are the ancient Greeks themselves who studied in or
visited Egypt , and they said so.
Q: How come black people could not sustain this civilization after the Europeans
invaded Egypt ? Where was our proverbial knowledge?
A : You first have to understand that black civilization was destroyed. Chancellor Williams
wrote a book, The Destruction of Black Civilization, where he describes that. The easiest
way to understand what happened is to take what happened to your own country in the last
century. Once you lose sovereignty, you are rubbished. Loss of sovereignty is the worst
thing that can happen to a people. The Egyptians tried long and hard to maintain their
sovereignty and power: it took the white people more than 1000 years of repeated attempts
to finally overrun Egypt . But once they finally accomplished it, it was one white group after
another. The Persians were the first whites to overrun Egypt . Before them, other groups
had penetrated Egypt but were fought off by the Egyptians. The long and short of it is that
525 BC was the final defeat of Egypt , about 2,500 years ago. After the Persians, the Greeks
defeated the Persians and took over Egypt . Then the Romans took over and occupied it till

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the Arabs invaded Egypt .

The Arab invasion was the turning point because all the previous conquerors just sent
people to administer Egypt , but the Arabs came in large numbers to live. They were a
settler multitude. They swamped and drove the real Egyptians away so that today, most
Egyptians don't look black. The only Egyptians who are still black are descended from
remnants of the ancient Egyptians. People like Sadat, the former Egyptian president. Sadat
didn't look like the normal Arab; he was black, being of Nubian descent, from the Nubian
remnants of the Ancient Egyptians. Boutrous Ghali, who was presented as an Egyptian, is a
Copt and the Copts are descendants of Greek invaders. So, Boutrous Ghali is a white man.
He descended from people like Cleopatra who were the Greek colonizers of Egypt . But, by
the lying accounts of modern Europeans, the Copts are the real Ancient Egyptians! The long
and short of it is that 525 BC marked the end of the sovereign ancient black Egypt .
Everything since then has been the Egypt of white invaders. The invaders have long since
taken over. That's the way it is with conquest. If you allow yourself to be conquered, you
are finished. Not many peoples survive conquest, especially by conquerors who are
determined to eliminate you. Black Africa is struggling to shake off the effects of just one
century of people who didn't even come in droves to live here. It's so hard. They scattered
your civilization, scattered your culture, scattered your mind and scattered your mentality.
And just getting yourselves out of that disaster is difficult enough, not to talk of when they
come in large numbers to settle permanently and take over your land. So, you can begin to
understand what happened in Egypt .
But the basic thing is that those illustrious Egyptians were black. The pyramids were built by
black people. All of the glory of Ancient Egypt belongs to black people.
But there are other questions, of course. Why is the influence of Ancient Egyptian
civilization not so manifest in the rest of Africa ? It's necessary to ask such questions. Egypt
happens to be one great achievement but where are the others? This is what makes it
easier for the whites to claim Egypt . Maybe if pyramids like those of Ancient Egypt are
found all over the continent and you lose Egypt to the whites, that's not so bad. There
would still be enough visible remains to save you from the imputation of having achieved
nothing. There are all kinds of questions about African history that need to be investigated,
but black people are yet to wake up from their slumber to investigate them. Cheikh Anta
Diop once asked: How can Africans love Africa when they don't know Africa ? A century of
European brainwashing through the education system has done its damage, and to get out
of it is a long and difficult process. So, people should just read Cheikh Anta Diop's works to
get themselves started. These include The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality,

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Pre-Colonial Black Africa , The Cultural Unity of Black Africa , and Civilization or Barbarism.
Q: It would seem that all these claims and counter claims have not been helped by
the seeming lack of any enduring account of how black people evolved as a race.
To the best of my knowledge, there doesn't seem to be a historically black theory
of creation outside of the big bang. You are knowledgeable in these things, do you
know of any?
A: We have the Ancient Egyptian cosmogony: it is the original from which the Hebrew
cosmogony in the Bible was derived. Dogon cosmogony was recorded in 1946 by some
French anthropologists. I believe there were many others and that, wherever there appears
to be none, it has been simply lost. The notion that some societies did not have their own
world systems, including cosmogonies, is, I think, just a Euro chauvinist prejudice. The valid
question, to my mind, is: would these cosmogonies still be remembered now, after what
befell black people for all of the last century?
Q: These things are known to have a way of enduring through the generations.
They may not be popular but you would still find people who know about these
accounts if ever they existed.
A : Well, if there are such people who do remember, until you seek and find them, how
would you know? Indians can remember theirs and their journey through time because they
still have the institutions that have transmitted Hindu lore and knowledge for many
thousands of years, from one generation to the next, orally, by their own methods, under
their own authorities. So too the Dogon. The condition for finding ancestral bodies of
knowledge, cosmogonies included, seems to be this: The society must have
preserved its ancestral organization, especially the institutions of the initiates,
those that conserved and transmitted ancestral knowledge of all sorts. In the 1940s
and 1950s, there were still many such societies left in Africa , societies that had managed to
preserve some cultural autonomy and had saved their ancestral institutions from total
destruction by the intolerance and fanaticism that is standard with Christians, Moslems,
colonial administrators, Europeanizers and Arabizers. That was why French anthropologists
were able to document the world systems of the Dogon, Bambara, Bozo, Kouroumba and
others. (See the book Conversations with Ogotemmeli, by Marcel Griaule). The point I am
making is that many such accounts as we had would have been destroyed in the last
century because part of the main work of the missionaries was to attack all our institutions,
calling them works of the devil and so on. So, they interrupted the transmission of ancestral
lore, and there are things that, if you interrupt transmission for two generations, they are
gone! If father doesn't teach son and son doesn't teach grandson, the knowledge is lost.

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And too much of that has happened to us in the last 100 years. So, even if a cosmogony
existed in a given society and we cannot find people who have received it from their
parents, it's lost. We Africans are like a people hit by a rampaging hurricane of barbarism
from Europe , a hurricane which swept through our continent, disrupting and destroying so
many things. If our people had woken up in the 1960s, it would have been easier to start
reconstructing the transmission structures because, at that time, some of these things were
still around. But now, after a full century of loss, it's very difficult to find the bits and pieces,
especially for people who had no strong institutions for preserving ancestral lore.
But even those who still have strong institutions may have found it hard to do so under the
hostile and deforming conditions of colonialism. Look at Bin people for instance. Their
monarchy is still intact. I, therefore, think that keepers of their ancestral world systems are
still there. So they could begin to reconstruct, but any society that does not have strong
institutions that can preserve those things is worse off. Ndi-Igbo are in this sad group. Even
the remnants of those few institutions that Ndi-Igbo had have been destroyed. Thats what
you destroy when you attack shrines and sacred groves. Missionaries destroyed most of
them 100 years ago; now its our own people who are destroying the remainder. You
recently demolished Okija shrine over some rubbish, some false and sensational allegations,
whereas its such institutions and their priests that preserve knowledge of the kind you are
asking about. The more you demonize them, the more you lose these precious things. Now,
this has gone on for a century; so what are you going to pick up that will be intact, coherent
and authentic? This is the reason why we dont know as much as we should know.
Take, for instance, the institution of Eze Nri, whether in Oraeri or in Nri: Is it still being
preserved? Are they still keeping the ancestral traditions intact? When the keepers of a
tradition go Christian or Islamic, a lot of things get adulterated, abandoned or lost. So there
are all kinds of difficulties in recovering the ancestral tradition after five generations of this
type of damage. I am not saying that the full story, if we had collected it a century ago,
would have answered all the questions you are raising. I am saying that we dont even have
that little to tell us how far we can recreate our history and the various myths of origin that
we had. There are myths of origin all over the world but if we could find out our own, it
would help to answer some of these questions.
Q: Now, how would you assess the present Nigerian society as it is. Are we
showing any real signs of readiness to stand on our feet?
A: Nigeria? Stand on its feet? This Nigeria that cannot survive one month without imports?
That must be the joke of the century! Can Nigeria defend herself? Can Nigeria defend her
territory and population from any attack? If she cant, what are you talking about? Where is

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Nigeria going? Nowhere but down the drain and into the sad condition of Haiti. The world is
in crisis, you cant defend yourself, you cant even grow your own food? All it would take to
scatter Nigeria is an embargo from wherever we import all these importables. If they
embargo exports to Nigeria for one month will there be any Nigeria left? You are in a
disaster if you cant even survive for a month unless your enemies allow you to eat. The
root of the disaster is that you dont even understand that you are at war and that you have
enemies; and you take your imperialist enemies as your best friends!
Q: Are we at war really?
A: Youve been at war for six hundred years and you dont even know it, and youve lost
every battle in that war. When you dont even know you are at war then youre lost. Europe
has been making war on the world since the time of Columbus. You complain about slave
trade. Who were the slaves? Were they not prisoners of war? You talk of the scramble for
Africa; was it just a scramble? It was the conquest of Africa, but you delude yourselves by
calling it a scramble. Colonialism: you were slaves to colonial masters, doing forced labor
for them; your foreign conquerors came and ruled you, thats slavery and thats war. When
some armed fellow comes to your house and takes it over, comes into your bedroom and
tells you what to do and not do, is he your friend or your enemy? We dont understand that
we are at war and that we have been at war for a long time. And that we have lost every
major encounter. Even your so-called independence might have counted as a partial victory,
but it isnt, because you didnt get independence. You didnt. So, if a people are at war and
have lost every battle for six centuries, are they not in disaster? Its not that a disaster is
coming, we are already in the final stages of it. The question now is: Will there be black
people living here in the next century? Will the people of Nigeria survive till this time next
century?
Q: What is the nature of this war? Its not a shooting war evidently.
A: Its long past the shooting stage. When Lugard and his troops were conquering different
bits and pieces of Nigeria, when they attacked Sokoto, Lokoja and other places; when
British troops attacked Arochukwu and crisscrossed all over Igboland shooting, burning and
destroying, that was the shooting stage that led to what you now call colonialism. So, we
lost the war before the shooting stage, lost it at the shooting stage, lost it at the
fundamental cultural stages when they destroyed our ancestral education system and
destroyed our religion. We lost all those stages of the war. Its like whats happening in
Sudan now: the Arabs overrun a village, kill the men, rape the women and force them into
slavery, capture the small children and raise them up as Arabs. Thats exactly what the
British did to us. They defeated all your kingdoms and non-kingdoms, captured the small

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children and sent them to mission schools where they raised them as fake Europeans.
Thats what we all are.
Q: Thats what we all are?
A: Thats what we all are; every one of us now in Nigeria . For five generations so far. You
see people have a baby today, tomorrow they hand him over to the church and the school
where children are brainwashed as imitation Europeans. Its a cultural war, a military war.
The military stage is over but it can come back again. We still have episodes of the shooting
war erupting from time to time -- as in Bakalori, Odi, Zaki-Biam and in the case of the Apo
Six -- when armed units of the Nigerian State massacre defenceless Nigerians, and do so
with impunity. And there is the political side too: you guys claim you have democracy, you
have the AU, you have NEPAD. You havent asked yourself what those organizations and
programs actually are; what purpose were they instituted to serve and what will happen to
you in another 50 years if they continue? You are at the tail end of a 600 year old disaster.
Q: What is the nature of this struggle?
A: It has been comprehensive all along. But at this terminal stage, its mostly a cultural
war. But its also an economic war in the sense that when Obasanjo goes and throws away
$12 billion of your money to the Paris Club, thats the economic side of the war. When he
jacks up your petrol prices, thats the economic side of the war. Who are the beneficiaries of
this jacking up and all that? Whose orders is he carrying out? Enemy orders. And how many
thousands have starved, gone mad or even died from the effects of these enemy policies
(foreignization, deregulation, etc) that OBJ has been implementing? They are the present
day casualties of the economic side of this war. But, of course, you dont understand
that the IMF, the UN, the WHO, the World Bank and WTO are enemy institutions. So you are
at war on every front and you dont even know it. They use these agencies to dictate your
government policies, down to the last detail. None of your budgets is devised without
abiding by the framework that the World Bank and the IMF impose, before it is allowed to
be written up and announced and you are allowed to implement it. Nyerere called it the
International Ministry of Finance. I call it the Imperialist Ministry of Finance. Thats what the
IMF actually is. And the imperialists use it to run Nigeria and the other provinces of their
global G-8 empire. And they sent you their agent, Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala to be your Finance
Minister and you accepted, and she is doing their job. She is on leave from the World Bank.
That wasnt quite clear until the other day when the MIT Alumni Magazine wrote that she is
on leave from the World Bank. So, shes still on their job. And shes your Minister of Finance
designing policies to impoverish you and enrich her imperialist masters. You say you are not
at war? Well, its worse than a Trojan Horse because the enemy has taken control of your

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brain. In the old imperialism, they would send a white governor general to come and run
your affairs. After a while they began sending their agents whom you appointed as
consultants to your presidents and to your ministry of finance, to co-ordinate oversee things
for the imperialists. Now they have locals whom they have trained and brought up and you
just make them your Minister of Finance or Central Bank Manager or this or that. So, your
own people are now running the provinces of their empire for them. That is the disaster in
which you are. And the bottom line of all this is that when you project all the things that are
happening now, youll see that your economic system is on its way to implode.
Q: How?
A: The self-uprooting dynamic of this upside-down economy will cause it to implode. But
even before you get to that point, theres the matter of oil. Your oil is not going to last
forever, is it? In fact, it will soon finish. This Nigeria you talk about, what is it? Its only a
pool of oil under your ground. And who mines it? The foreigners mine it, they tell you how
much they have taken and give you some money. And even before the oil finishes, if they
refuse to pay you tomorrow, Nigeria will collapse in 6 weeks. This Nigerian state you are
talking about with Obasanjo and all his gragra, all this foolishness about being the giant of
Africa and about getting a permanent veto seat on the UN Security Council; if Obasanjo, or
whoever takes over Aso Rock, doesnt have the money to pay his security services, nobody
will take orders from him; Nigeria will collapse in one week. So when the Americans were
warning about your collapsing in 10 years, they were just being nice to you. All it takes for
them to destroy Nigeria , whenever it is in their interest to do so, is to instruct the oil
companies not to pay you a damn penny for six weeks, and Nigeria is finished. Nigeria is a
failed state already, and if you dont have oil revenue for six weeks all your governors, all
the contracts they have been sharing will come to an end. And who will be loyal to the
Nigerian state if money is not being dished out? You are living in a state that doesnt really
exist. Its only a contraption that the foreigners built and are using for their own purposes.
They can disappear it any day they like. All that your on shore-off shore debate. None of the
oil is effectively yours. Its like a child who is told that a goat is its own. The day its killed
he will not know. If he is lucky, he will arrive to see his goat in the soup pot on the fire. The
oil still left in Ijaw land in the Niger Delta, who mines it? If they refuse to mine it tomorrow,
what will you do? If the oil companies say they are pulling out tomorrow, what will you do?
They have their reasons for not doing so for now. You are a big power, right? Big enough for
a Security Council veto seat, right? The easiest way for them to call your game, to dispel
your delusions and cut you down to size, is to say: sorry, we shall no longer mine oil in
Nigeria and your state will collapse. You dont have the off shore oil under your control. The
US Navy is in physical possession of all the oil fields in the Gulf of Guinea. You cant dislodge

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them. What do you have to dislodge them with and say: this place is mine, I want you out?
So, oil money is the only thing holding Nigeria together today and that oil is not in your
control. So, your state is not only insecure, its rickety, it has no economic foundation. All it
takes is for someone to stop paying money into its account and this conceited Lugardian
state will disappear, poof! Your president cannot give an order to anyone and have it carried
out if there is no money to share, whether legally or illegally. The caliphate thinks it is
clever but it does not realize that the game its been playing is coming to an end.
Q: The caliphate itself?
A: The caliphate is dead. All you have been seeing for a hundred years is the artificially
revived corpse of the caliphate. It was already dying when the British propped it up for their
own purposes and later handed Nigeria over to it to run for them. The caliphate has
foolishly run Nigeria into the ground and turned it into a cesspool, and neither Nigeria nor
the Caliphate will survive without oil revenue. Nothing in Nigeria will survive without oil
revenue and that revenue can be stopped any day by the G8 masters when it suits their
interest. So, you are not in control of anything. You cant even feed yourselves, you cant
produce food. To produce food, you now must depend on fertilizers, and fertilizers depend
on oil. The Nigerian state has even sabotaged the refineries that would help produce
fertilizers locally to lessen the impact of an enemy embargo. If your oil money is cut off, but
you have working refineries, you can try to make your own fertilizers and carry on for a
while. But now, with your refineries killed off, if theres no imported fertilizer for one season,
therell be no food! What I am pointing out is that you are living in a rickety structure that is
already as good as dead. All that is waiting to happen is Nigerias official funeral. And you
are shouting keep Nigeria one, Nigeria will survive. How can it? Why should it? Okay lets
watch and see.
Q: What must Nigeria do to counter these obvious inadequacies?
A: I am not an adviser to Nigeria. If I have any idea, why should I help to sustain this
rickety structure by giving it to them? Nigeria to me is an enemy state. So, I dont see why
I should give out any idea on how to preserve Nigeria.

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Q: Nigeria, an enemy state?

A: Yes, it was created by our enemies. Lugard was an enemy of the African peoples he
conquered and foisted the Nigerian state on. And that state has not changed. It was
programmed to be the enemy of the Nigerian peoples, and so it remains. Just think of
Bakalori, Odi, Zaki-Biam, the Apo Six. Is that the behavior of a friend or enemy of the
Nigerian people? So why should I be advising an enemy creation on how to preserve itself?
Its none of my business.
Lagos ,
Nov. 2005

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VI
The Political Leader Considered as the Representative of a Culture.
Sekou Toure
(On October 2, 1958 Sekou Tour, proclaimed Guinea's independence from France
and became its first president. One year later he gave a speech in Conakry, the
capital in which he outlined the role of political leaders in reflecting and
developing the culture of their nations.

That speech appears below.)

Since culture is not an entity or a phenomenon which is separate or separable from a

people, the political leaders who have, in a free and democratic manner, acquired the
confidence of that people with a view to directing it along the way it has chosen, are at the
same time the expression of the aspirations of their people and the representatives or
defenders of its cultural values.
The culture of a people is necessarily determined by its material and moral conditions. The
man and his surroundings constitute a whole.
Every free and sovereign people finds itself placed in conditions more favourable to the
expression of its cultural values than a colonized country, deprived of all freedom, whose
cultu sustains the nefarious consequences of its state of subjection4 Whether it is a
question of a free people or of a colonized people, the political leader who truly remains the
authentic expression of his people is the one whose thought, sense of existence, social
conduct and objects of action are in perfect harmony with the characteristics of his people.
Whether he tends, in a conservative spirit, to ensure the maintenance of an old economic,
social and moral equilibrium, or in revolutionary manner, to replace the old conditions, by
new conditions more favourable to the people, the political leader is by the very fact of his
communion of ideas and action with his people, the representative of a culture. That culture
may be reactionary or progressist according to the nature of the aims set for the action of
the political movement to which the people have committed themselves.
The man, before becoming the leader of a group, a people, or party of the people, has
inevitably made a choice between the par and the future. In this way he will represent and
defend the a values, or he will sustain and give impulsion to the development and constant
enrichment of all the values of his people, including the cultural values, which by their

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content and their form will express the realities of the conditions of existence of the people,
or the need which they experience or feel for a transformation.
In consequence, whatever may be the fundamental character of a culture, reactionary or
progressist, the political leader who is freely chosen by a people, maintains a natural link
between action and the culture proper to his people, since, in any event, he could not act
effectively upon the people if he ceased to obey the rules and values which determine their
behaviour and influence their thought.
Why are the great thinkers of capitalism not accepted by the peoples who have chosen
other ways of evolution? The leaders of the popular democracies could not represent a
culture which was capitalist in essence for the good reason that their peoples have chosen
the socialist system.
Arab culture is equally different from Latin culture because of the fact that the Arab peoples
and the Latin peoples obey different thoughts and different rules of life.
In addition to the material and technical state in which a people finds itself, their mental,
philosophic and moral state gives their culture a form of expression and a significance which
are proper to them, quite independent of the extent to which they have a decisive influence
on the general cultural context.
The imperialists use scientific, technical, economic, literary and moral cultural values in
order to maintain their regime of exploitation and oppression. The oppressed peoples
equally use cultural values of a contrary nature to the former, in order to make a better
fight against imperialism and to extricate themselves from the colonial system. If scientific
knowledge, modern techniques and the elevation of thought to the level of higher human
principles for the perfecting of social life, are necessary for the enrichment of a culture, they
none the less retain the capacity of being used for contradictory purposes.
It is at this point that the cultural value of a people must be identified with the contributory
value which it may represent in the development of universal civilization in establishing
between human beings concrete relations of equality, solidarity, unity and fraternity.
Thus, the true political leaders of Africa, whose thought and attitude tend towards the
national liberation of their peoples can only be committed men, fundamentally committed
against all the forms and forces of depersonalization of African culture. They represent, by

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the anti-colonialist nature and the national content of their struggle, the cultural values of
their society mobilized against colonization.
It is as representatives of these cultural values that they lead the struggle for the
decolonization of all the structures of their country.
But decolonization does not consist merely in liberating oneself from the presence of the
colonizers: it must necessarily be completed by total liberation from the spirit of the
colonized, that is to say, from all the evil consequences, moral, intellectual and cultural, of
the colonial system.
Colonization, in order to enjoy a certain security, always needs to create and maintain a
psychological climate favourable to its justification: hence the negation of the cultural,
moral and intellectual values of the subjected people; that is why the struggle for national
liberation is only complete when, once disengaged from the colonial apparatus, the country
becomes conscious of the negative values deliberately injected into its life, thought and
traditions... in order to extirpate them in the conditions of its evolution and flourishing This
science of depersonalizing the colonized people is sometimes so subtle in its methods that it
progressively succeeds in falsifying our natural psychic behaviour and devaluing our own
original virtues and qualities with a view to our assimilation It is no mere chance that French
colonialism reached its height at the period of the famous and now exploded theory of
primitive and pre-logical mentality of Lvy-Bruhl. I modifying certain forms of its
manifestations, although it apparently tries to adapt itself to the inevitable evolution of the
oppressed peoples, colonization has never engendered, under the most diverse and subtle
aspects, anything but a moral, intellectual and cultural superiority complex towards the
colonized peoples. And this policy of depersonalization is all the more successful since the
nature of the degree of evolution of the colonized and I colonizer is different. It is all the
more deeply rooted where domination is long-lasting.
In the most varied forms, the colonized complex taints evolution and imprints itself on our
very reflexes. Thus the wearing of a cap and sun-glasses, regarded as a sign of western
civilization, bears witness to this depersonalization which runs counter to the current of our
evolution.
Nevertheless, it is wrong to think that one people, one race one culture possess by
themselves all the moral, spiritual, social or intellectual values: to believe that the truth is

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not necessarily to be found elsewhere than in ones own national, racial or cultural
background is an Utopia.
We have already said that human discoveries, intellectual acquisitions, the expansion of
knowledge do not belong exclusively to anyone. They are the result of a sum of universal
discoveries, acquisitions and expansion in which no people has the right to claim a
monopoly.
The immigrants into the United States did not leave behind them at the frontiers of their
respective countries all that they acquired in the intellectual field; they did not have to
reinvent sailing ships, iron tools or gunpowder. They used them for their own needs before
certain colonial powers thought of claiming their discovery and the rights of ownership in
them.
It is not because he symbolizes the colonial presence that the French gendarme in garrison
at Dakar or Algiers is the proprietor of the process of liberating the atom. And yet it is in
this form and by similar intellectual approaches that colonialism has established the
principle of its superiority.
Our school books in the colonial schools teach us about the wars of the Gauls, the life of
Joan of Arc or Napoleon, the list of French Dpartements, the poems of Lamartine or the
plays of Moliere, as though Africa had never had any history, any past, any geographical
existence, any cultural life... Our pupils were only appreciated according to their aptitude in
this policy of integral cultural assimilation.
Colonialism, through its diverse manifestations, by boasting of having taught our elite in its
schools science, technique, mechanics and electricity, succeeds in influencing a number of
our intellectuals to such an extent that they end up by finding in this the justification for
colonial domination. Some go so far as to believe that, in order to acquire the true universal
knowledge of science, they must necessarily disregard the moral, intellectual and cultural
values of their own country in order to subject themselves to and assimilate a culture which
is often foreign to them in a thousand respects.
And yet, is not the knowledge which leads to the practice of surgery taught in the same way
in London, Prague, Belgrade and Bordeaux? Is the procedure for calculating the volume of a
body not identical in New York, Budapest and Berlin? Is the principle of Archimedes not the

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same in China and in Holland? There is no Russian chemistry or Japanese chemistry, there
is only chemistry pure and simple.
The science which results from all universal knowledge has no nationality. The ridiculous
conflicts which rage about the origin of this or that discovery do not interest us, because
they add nothing to the value of the discovery.
But, however much it may dissemble, colonialism betrays its intentions in the organization
and nature of the education which it claims to dispense in the name of some humanism or
other, I know not what. The truth is that, to start with, it had to satisfy its needs for junior
staff, clerks, book-keepers, typists, messengers etc. The elementary character of the
education dispensed bears sufficiently eloquent witness to the object in view, for the
colonial power took great care, for example, not to set up real administrative colleges for
young Africans which might have trained genuine executives, or to teach the real history of
Africa and so forth.
What would have happened on the morow of the Independance of Guinea, if we had not
ourselves created, during the period of the Outline Law, our own administrative college? The
administrative life of the Republic of Guinea would have faced us at Government level with a
multitude of problems which we could only have solved in empirical fashion.
This determination to keep the populations in a constant state of inferiority marks both the
programmes and the nature of colonial education. It was desired that the African teacher
should be and should remain a teacher of inferior quality, in order to keep the quality of
teaching in Africa at an inferior level. In contrast, an obstacle was placed in the way of
African officials attaining to senior rank by insisting on the equivalence of diplomas. This
diversion was so well managed that some of our trade union comrades, although anticolonialist, fought furiously about these problems of the equivalent value of parchments
instead of directly attacking the fundamental reasons for this policy of hocus-pocus.
Special teachers, special doctors! what the colonial system needed was men to produce,
men to create, labourers, woodcutters in the Middle Congo or the Ivory Coast, peasants in
the Sudan or Dahomey, and so forth. The colonists of French West Africa and French
Equatqrial Africa, the powerful colonial companies of the Belgian Congo and Rhodesia would
not installed themselves in Africa had it not been for the wealth of Africa in its soil and its
men, regarded as an instrument to exploit that wealth. And it was in order to resist the
great endemic scourges which threatened the quantitative equilibrium of the population by

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reducing manpower that the colonial power created the corps of African doctors, with the
determination to make them a subordinate corps, of medical workers.
Thus, on the level of pure knowledge, on the level of universal knowledge, the education
dispensed in Africa was deliberately inferior and limited to those disciplines which would
allow the better exploitation of the population. In addition, primary and secondary education
was constantly directed towards depersonalization and cultural dependence.
We must denounce that false sentimentalism which consists in believing ourselves indebted
to the contribution of a culture imposed to the detriment of our own. The problem must be
tackled objectively. How many of our young students, even without realizing it, judge
African culture by assessing it according to the hierarchy of values established in this field
by the culture of the colonial power?
The value of a culture can only be assessed in relation to its influence in the development of
social conduct. Culture is the way in which a given society directs and utilizes its resources
of thought.
Marx and Ghandi have not contributed less to the progress of humanity than Victor Hugo or
Pasteur.
But while we were learning to appreciate such a culture and to know the names of its most
eminent interpreters, we were gradually losing the traditional notions of our own culture and
the memory of those who had thrown lustre upon it. How many of our young schoolchildren
who can quote Bossuet, are ignorant of the life of El Hadj Omar? How many African
intellectuals have unconsciously deprived themselves of the wealth of our culture so as to
assimilate the philosophic concepts of a Descartes or a Bergson?
So long as we argue solely in the light of this external acquisition, so long as we continue to
judge and to make our determinations according to the values of colonial culture, we shall
not be decolonized and we shall not succeed in giving our thoughts and acts a national
content, that is to say a utility placed at the service of our Society. So true is it that every
culture worthy of the name must be able to give and to receive; we can only regard foreign
cultures as a necessary contribution to the enrichment of our own culture.
The surroundings determine the individual; that is why the peasant in our villages has more
authentically African characteristics than the lawyer or doctor in the big towns. In fact the

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former, who preserves more or less intact his personality and the nature of his culture, is
more sensitive to the real needs of Africa.
There is no indictment to be drawn up against intellectualism but it is important to
demonstrate the depersonalization of the African intellectual, a depersonalization for which
nobody can hold him responsible, because it is the price which the colonial system demands
for teaching him the universal knowledge which enables him to be an engineer, a doctor, an
architect or an accountant. That is why decolonization at the individual level must operate
more profoundly upon those who have been trained by the colonial system.
It is in relation to this decolonization that the African intellectual will afford effective and
invaluable aid to Africa. The more he realizes the need to free himself intellectually from the
colonized complex, the more he will discover our original virtues and the more he will serve
the African cause.
Our incessant efforts will be directed towards finding our own ways of development if we
wish our emancipation and our evolution to take place without our personality being
changed thereby. Every time we adopt a solution which is authentically African in its nature
and its conception, we shall solve our problems easily, because all those who take part will
not be disorientated or surprised by what they have to achieve; they will realize without
difficulty the manner in which they must work, act, and think. Our specific qualities will be
used to the full and, in the long run, we shall speed up our historic evolution.
How many young men and young girls have lost the taste our traditional dances and the
cultural value of our popular songs; they have all become enthusiasts for the tango or the
waltz or for some singer of charm or realism.
This unconsciousness of our characteristic values inevitably leads to our isolation from our
own social background, whose slightest human qualities escape us. In this way we finish by
disregarding the real significance of the things which surround us, our own significance.
In contrast, the African peasants and craftsmen are in no way complicated by the colonial
system, whose culture, habits and values they do not know.
Is it necessary to emphasize that, in spite of their good will, their discipline and their fidelity
to the ideal of freedom and democracy, in spite of their faith in the destiny of their country,
the colonized who have been educated by the colonizer have their thought more tainted by
the colonial imprint than the rural masses who have evolved in their original context.

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Africa is essentially a country of community government. Collective life and social solidarity
give its habits a fund of humanism which many peoples might envy. It is also because of
these human qualities that a human being in Africa cannot conceive the organization of his
life outside that of the family, village or clan society. The voice of the African peoples has no
features, no name, no individual ring. But in the circles which have been contaminated by
the spirit of the colonizers, who has not observed the progress of personal egoism?
Who has not heard the defence of the theory of art for arts sake, the theory of poetry for
poetrys sake, the theory of every man for himself?
Whereas our anonymous artists are the wonder of the world, and everywhere we are asked
for our dances, our music, our songs, our statuettes, in order that their profound
significance may be better known, some of our young intellectuals think that it is enough to
know Prvert, Rimbaud, Picasso or Renoir to be cultivated and to be able to carry our
culture, our art and our personality on to a higher plane. These people only appreciate the
appearances of things, they only judge through the medium of their complexes and
mentality of the colonized. For them, our popular songs are only of value so far as they fit
harmoniously into the western modes which are foreign to their social significance.
Our painters! they would like them to be more classical; our masks and our statuettes!
purely aesthetic; without realizing that African art is essentially utilitarian and social.
Mechanized and reduced to a certain restrictive form of thought, habituated to judge in the
light of values which they have not been allowed to determine for themselves, educated to
appreciate according to the spirit, thought, conditions and will of the colonial system, they
are stupefied every time we denounce the nefarious character of their behaviour. But if they
interrogated themselves, in the light, not of their theoretical knowledge of the world, but by
attaining to selfconsciousness, about the true values of their people and their motherland, if
they asked themselves what their conduct contributes to all Africa turned towards its
objectives of liberation and progress, of peace and dignity, they would judge and appreciate
our problems.
They do not realize that the slightest of our original artistic manifestations represents an
active participation in the life of our people. They divorce themselves from the culture of the
people, the art of real life.

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In all things there is form and substance, and what is of prime importance in African art is
its effective and living content, the profound thought which animates it and makes it useful
to Society.
Intellectuals or artists, thinkers or researchers, their capacities have no values unless they
really concur with the life of the people, unless they are integrated in fundamental manner
with the action, thought and aspirations of the populations.
If they isolate themselves from their own surroundings by their special mentality of the
colonized, they can have no influence, they will be of no value to the revolutionary action
which the African populations have undertaken to liberate themselves from colonialism, they
will be outcasts and strangers in their own country.
This intellectual decolonization, this decolonization of thoughts and concepts may seem
infinitely difficult. There is, in effect, a sum of acquired habits, of uncontrolled behaviour, a
way of living, a manner of thinking, the combination of which constitutes a sort of second
nature which certainly seems to have destroyed the original personality of the colonized.
It is not intellectual approaches, nor even a sustained and patient labour of readapting the
will which will achieve the purpose. It will only be enough if there is reintegration in the
social background, a return to Africa by the daily practice of African life so as to readapt
oneself to its basic values, its proper activities, its special mentality.
The official, who lives constantly among other officials, will not give up his bad colonial
habits, because they represent a daily practice for himself and the circles in which he lives.
He will not succeed in defining himself in relation to the African revolution, he will continue
to define himself in relation to himself as an official living in administrative circles. He will
have reduced his human objectives solely to an administrative career.
The artist who is proudly convinced that it is enough for him to be known in order to
express the African personality in his works, will remain a colonized intelligence, an
intelligence enslaved by colonial thought.
Take the example of the Ballets of our comrade Keita Fodeiba which for several years have
been touring the world to reveal through the medium of that traditional mode of expression,
African dancing, the cultural, moral and intellectual values of our Society. And yet it was not
at the Paris Opera or the Vienna Opera that these artists were initiated. Their choreographic

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initiation merely starts from their authentically African education and the national
consciousness of our artistic values. The troupe is an anonymous troupe in which there is no
first or second star. The singers only know the popular songs of Africa as they learned them
in their far-off village. The value of the troupe of our comrade Keita Fodeiba is its
authenticity, and it will have done more to reveal the social and choreographic values of
Africa than will ever be done by all the works of colonial inspiration which have been written
on this subject. And that because no author has been able or has understood how to
interpret the internal significance of the dance, which is, in Africa, a part of the social and
intellectual life of the people.
It is not enough to write a revolutionary hymn to take part in the African revolution; it is
necessary to act in the revolution with the peoplewith the people and the hymns will come
of their own accord.
In order to exercise authentic action, it is necessary to be oneself a living part of Africa and
its thought, an element in that popular energy which is totally mobilized for the Liberation,
progress and happiness of Africa. There is no place outside this one combat either for the
artist or the intellectual who is not himself committed and totally mobilized with the people
in the great struggle of Africa and of suffering humanity.
The man of Africa, yesterday still marked by the unworthiness of others, still excluded from
universal enterprises, set at a distance from a world which had made him inferior by the
practice of domination, this man, deprived of everything, stateless in his own country,
seated naked and impoverished on his own wealth, is suddenly re-emerging into the world,
to claim the fulness of his human rights and an entire share in universal life.
This attitude is not without doing some damage to the caricatured image which the colonial
conquest had projected here and there, of the black man, doomed, according to them, to
congenital incapacity. It is not the least of the errors of certain civilizations to shut
themselves up in egocentric considerations in judging what is foreign to them and could not
either satisfy their special criterions or their historic tradition, nor correspond to their
hierarchy of conventional values.
It is a very heavy responsibility borne by the civilizations of conquest that they oriented
their forces towards the destruction of human societies whose values they had neither the
capacity nor the power to appreciate objectively. Contemplating the ruins of this
destruction, the world of thought and the world of research are to-day in communion in the

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same anxious effort to try to snatch from the destroyed civilizations the secret of the
unknown values which enabled them to develop according to an intellectual process, the
universal knowledge of which is forever lost.
The crime of Fernando Cortez in torturing the last Emperor f the Aztecs appears less as the
misdeed of a man than as an irremediable error on the part of the civilizations of conquest.
In judging in the light of their own proper surroundings, in determining according to the
values of their own proper cu1ture, the civilizations of conquest, far from encouraging the
development of human values, have reduced their possibilities of expression and, of set
purpose, subjected them partially to ferocious exploitation and generalized oppression.
But the reign of force and fraudulent possession is henceforth doomed to disaster, for there
no longer exists any external influence, any foreign pressure which can bend a people to the
laws of dispossession and domination. In the slow progress of the human universe, which is
given sanction in proportion to the development of the universal conscience, brute force and
illegitimate sway are becoming increasingly on the fringe of mans positive values.
Africa which only yesterday was still the plaything and the take of boundless appetites, the
mute witness of the slow degradation of the noblest social mentalities, is to-day totally
committed to the road of its freedom, its dignity and its complete rehabilitation. Yesterday
dominated, but not conquered, Africa is determined to deliver its special message to the
world, and to contribute to the human universe the fruit of its experiences, the whole of its
intellectual resources and the teachings of its proper culture.
The moral personality of Africa, long denied through the medium of the most fantastic
interpretations and the grossest historical falsifications, barely precedes the growing
manifestation of the African personality, which the forces of conquest and domination can
no longer reduce with impunity.
The Negro, whatever may be his place of asylum, whatever his natal region, has finally
liberated himself from the weight of a factitious inferiority inflicted upon him by the
domination, from the moment that he reappeared in his full and entire authenticity,
legitimately proud of the ability to reclaim control over his destiny and full responsibility for
his history.

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In truth, there could be no confusion between the apparent submission of the African
peoples and their profound determination to escape from depersonalization. To submit in
order to save yourself, to accept in order to endure, that has been the hard philosophy of
the Negro snatched from his origins, or deprived of his free will.
No malediction will have weighed so heavily upon a people as that born of a coalition of race
and interests to achieve, in the same enterprise, enslavement or destruction, exploitation or
ruin.
But the domain of man, growing and extending beyond the bounds of the world, could not
tolerate those enclosed estates which the feudal nations appropriated to themselves under
the sign of force: the man of to-day requires the whole earth, a total solidarity and a full
participation in its works and its enterprises. Partly by necessity and partly by conscious
determination, man is proceeding to eliminate the individualistic and racist heresies of which
the Negro world will have been the last tragic victim.
The gates of the future will not open before a few privileged ones, nor before a people elect
among peoples, but they will yield to the combined thrust of peoples and races when the
efforts of all peoples allied by the need of a universal fraternity are joined together and
complete each other.
However near this time may be, and however powerful human hopes for a fruitful and
unlimited future, universal reconciliation cannot become effective until the excluded peoples
have achieved their total independence, exercised their entire dignity and ensured their full
blossoming. To meet its requirements and abdicate none of its human responsibilities, Africa
is drawing untiringly upon its own sources so as to perfect its authenticity and enrich the
nourishing sap from which it has arisen throughout the obscure milleniums of history.
Harmonizing the resources of his thought with the pitiless laws of a world led and directed
by the necessities of a constant development, having recourse to the hard disciplines of
concrete knowledge as much as to his own moral and spiritual riches, the Negro is
committed to maintain intact the values and outlook of an original culture which has
survived all the extreme vicissitudes which have marked its estiny.It is just as superfluous
to inquire what might or might not have been good as to try to determine opportunities lost
or missed. Only error, analysed objectively according to its causes and effects, brings the
mind a constant enrichment and gives man the positive achievement of experimentation.

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Negro culture, preserved from any profound alteration, flows into universal life, not as an
antagonistic element, but with the anxious care to be a factor of equilibrium, a power for
peace, a force of solidarity in favour of a new civilization which will outdistance the great
hopes of mankind and fashion itself in contact with all the currents of thought.
The future cannot be conceived as a reiteration of the past, no, as a closed field reserved
solely for those human societies which are secretly initiated or arbitrarily privileged.
The future will be the sum of cultures and civilizations which do not measure their special
contribution or drive a bargain in respect of their singular values. To reach these successive
summits it is not too much for each one to join his efforts with those of others, to deliver to
the world his intellectual resources and his scientific and technical knowledge, for no people,
no nation, can move and grow except with and by the others. Any doctrine of cultural
isolation of cellularization, whether its motives are a proud superiority or an unacceptable
group selfishness, conceals a fatal error in consequence of which the isolated particle will
succumb.
Without even wishing to respond to the unnatural challenge of the racist ideal, which
insolently claims to harness for itself alone the sap and the fruits of the world, the Negro is
convinced that his mere presence entitles him to a full and complete participation in human
works, not as a denatured or outdone element, but in the character of a new power, of an
unexploited intellectual force whose potentialities are relevant to the universal enterprises of
progress, justice and human solidarity.
In the domain of thought man can claim to be the brain of the world, but on the plane of
concrete life, where every intervention affects the physical and spiritual being, the world is
always the brain of man, for it is at that level that the totality of thinking powers and units
are found, the dynamic forces of development and perfection, it is there that the fusion of
energies operates and that in the long run the sum of mans intellectual values inscribed.
But who can claim to exclude a particular group of thought, a particular form of thought, or
a particular human family without by that very fact putting himself beyond the pale of
universal life?
The right of existence extends to presence, conception, expression and action. Any
amputation of this fundamental right must be set down as a debit to mankinds account.

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It is, for the rest, a difficult mission which the Negro has set himself who has chosen to be
at the same time the intellectual instrument of the rehabilitation of a race and the
messenger of a culture dispossessed of its right of free expression, and whose profound
content and real significance have been falsified by the multiple interpretations given to it
by the outside world.
But this action undertaken by the messengers of our culture cannot be isolated from the
general movement for the reconquest of the rights of expression and means of development
of the people of Africa, totally mobilized in the struggle for their dignity and their liberty, on
the side of the equality of men and peoples.
The process of the participation of the Negro in universal achievements stems in the first
place from the African personality, which cannot be validly reconstituted by the intermediary
of wills or forces external to Africa, or outside the factors of independence and unity on
which the destiny of the Negro world reposes. The cultural compromises which the
domination has established by way of contact and by way of constraint, impose a complete
reconversion upon the man of Africa so that his authentic personality, the full possibilities of
his singular values and the means of employing his human resources may all reappear.
In the independence of its young sovereignty, that is the way which the people of Guinea
have unanimously engaged themselves for the total liberation and effective unity of the
African people so as to accelerate their march towards technical, economic a cultural
progress in a society in perfect social and equilibrium and in a world of real human
civilization.
Sources:
J. Ayo Langley, Ideologies of Liberation in Black Africa, 1856-1970 (London: Rex Collings,
1979).

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VII
Black Woman
Leopold Senghor
(A Poem by Dr. Leopold Senghor former President of Senegal)
Naked woman, Black woman
Clothed with your colour which is life,
with your form which is beauty!
In your shadow I have grown up; the
gentleness of your hands was laid over my eyes.
And now, high up on the sun-baked
pass, at the heart of summer, at the heart of noon,
I come upon you, my Promised Land,
And your beauty strikes me to the heart
like the flash of an eagle.
Naked Woman, Dark Woman
Firm-fleshed ripe fruit, sombre raptures
of black wine, mouth making lyrical my mouth
Savannah stretching to clear horizons,
savannah shuddering beneath the East Wind's
eager caresses
Carved tom-tom, taut tom-tom, muttering
under the Conqueror's fingers
Your solemn contralto voice is the
spiritual song of the Beloved.
Naked Woman, Dark Woman
Oil that no breath ruffles, calm oil on the
athlete's flanks, on the flanks of the Princes of Mali
Gazelle limbed in Paradise, pearls are stars on the
night of your skin
Delights of the mind, the glinting of red
gold against your watered skin
Under the shadow of your hair, my care
is lightened by the neighbouring suns of your eyes.
Naked Woman, Black Woman,
I sing your beauty that passes, the form
that I fix in the Eternal,
Before jealous fate turn you to ashes to
feed the roots of life.

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VIII
Pambazuka News
The Global Crisis of Capitalism And Its Impact
Dani Nabudere (2008-12-11)
http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/52604
The present financial crisis afflicting the global economy should not be
seen from the narrow focus of the credit crunch and its relationship to
the subprime mortgage crisis in the Western countries, especially the
US. The crisis goes to the very foundations of the global capitalist
system and it should be analysed from that angle. What is at the core of
the crisis is the over-extension of credit on a narrow material
production base. This is in a situation in which money has become
increasingly detached from its material base of a money commodity that
can measure its value such as gold.
The expansion of the world economy from 1945 onwards was based on the US providing
some kind of link between money and the gold standard, which
the US tried to maintain until its collapse in the 1970s. Increasingly
the dollar became the global currency but without a backing to its
currency from a money commodity. The over-expansion of credit that has
taken place since then, especially with the globalisation of the world
economy, has meant that a lot of paper money and monetary instruments in
the form of derivatives and future options have lost any relationship
to the fundamentals in the material production of the world economy.
That is why there has been a growing outcry that the growth of
speculative capital has over-run the growth of productive capital
with large amounts of money and credit circulating without the backing
of any production at all. That is also why the relationship between the
fundamentals in the economy and the new credit instruments created on
a daily basis in many cases from speculative short-selling have become
narrower and narrower over time. This is also why the present financial
crisis is also a reflection of the energy and food crisis, because oil
and food products such as wheat, rice and other commodities have been
subjected to speculative trading to back up paper money many years in
the future. The British Prime Minister, among the world leaders, is the
only one who has seen this connection when he brought it up in the World
Bank meeting a few months ago and also when he met the US Democratic
Party Presidential candidate, Barrack Obama, when he visited Europe
recently.
Thus the amount of credit floating around the world is loose money
completely run-wild, which claims a relationship with a narrow
production base. This is in a situation when the US is increasingly
unable to repay debts it has accumulated in its Treasury Bonds and
Bills, in which the rest of the world have placed their reserves. Most
African countries have millions of dollars in these US Treasury bills,
which are held as the countries reserves. China, India and Japan have

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trillions deposited in these T bills and bonds This means that should
the world economy collapse under pressure of loose money wanting to be
given a value (which they do not have) so that the holders of that
money can preserve their wealth, those holdings in US Treasury bills
(or US debt to the rest of the world) will be lost forcing many weak
economies to collapse along with it.
This is why it is wrong to conclude, like many people do that capitalism
has the capacity, as it has shown over the years, to always reinvent
itself by growing a new skin to resist the pangs of crisis inflicted on
it by its own greed. That is a false conclusion. US and British
capitalism are being put under pressure to stay a float only by
nationalising a number of banks and the corporations that can no longer
sustain their operations because of shortage of liquid cash. These
corporations and banks demand that the state should bail them out. The
state is being forced to bail these enterprises out on condition that
they shall sell the bulk of their shares to the state. This means that
these capitalist states are being forced to move in the direction of
central planning and management of the economy. For lack of space, we
cannot go into this matter in greater detail.
In short, what Karl Marx called the financial oligarchy is demanding
that the state should take over their burdens and maintain the value
of their valueless credit instruments while insisting that the poor
workers and the middle classes shall take care of themselves. In other
world, the oligarchy demand communism for themselves while relegating
socialism and capitalism for the middle class and the working class and
the other poor strata of society because socialism and capitalism are
the only ways through which the middle class and the working poor can
compete among themselves for survival. Remember that Marx defined
communism as: to each according to his needs and socialism as: to
each according to his capacities. Capitalism can now better be defined
as: to each according to his own devices, which is a paradigm fit for
the working poor.

THE CREDIT CRUNCH AND THE FOOD CRISIS

The economic crisis has also revealed the way credit over-expansion has
affected food prices throughout the world. In fact when the credit
crunch struck the world and the food crisis was announced, the crisis
was recognised as a global food crisis. That is why the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank immediately held a special session of
the Boards of Governors of their institutions to develop policies to
deal with this crisis when it became clear that the food crisis was
likely to stay with us until 2015 at the very least.
Immediately following the meetings of these multilateral institutions,
the World Food Organisation-FAO held an urgent Food Summit on June 3-5
in Rome, in which the Summit called for an immediate response by
governments. After the World Bank meeting, the British prime minister,
Gordon Brown, wrote a letter to the Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo
Fukuda, who was at the time the chair of the G8, in which he asked the

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group to act with speed to address the soaring food prices. What was
significant was that Gordon also recognised that the financial
market-based risk management instruments, including derivatives, had to
be considered as contributing to the food price volatilities. What did
Gordon Brown mean by this statement? The real problem underlying
currency instability and commodity price volatilities is the fact that
the dollar, which acts as a global reserve currency, is not backed by
any solid money commodity such as gold or silver. These money
commodities were historically overwhelmed by the growth of capitalist
wealth. As a result not all paper wealth that was held by economic
actors could be changed into gold in periods of crisis when the demand
for real money became overwhelming. With the collapse of the gold
standard in the US in the 1970s because of the outgrowth of Eurodollars,
attempts were made to rely on other commodities such as platinum to back
up the dollar, but this was a non-starter because the cost of storing
platinum was too high to be borne by paper wealth holders. But financial
instruments, especially future options and instruments called
derivatives continued to grow in volume.
This is what led to the food commodities coming into the picture to back
up future contracts and derivatives expressed in US dollars. The centre
of the global commodity trade is the Chicago Board of Trade-CBOT. It is
here that global trade in commodities is valued and undertaken together
with other commodities markets. It is also here that all commodities,
including food commodities, are financialised in dollar financial
instruments Wheat, oats, corn, rice and soybean are all agricultural
products traded on various commodities exchanges, including the CBOT.
Here the exchanges also trade the financial products, as well as
futures and options contracts on these and several derivative products
such as bean oil. Coffee, cocoa, sugar, cotton and orange juice are all
'soft' commodities, many of which are traded on the CSCE (Coffee, Sugar
and Cocoa Exchange). Interestingly, since 80% of the oranges grown in
the U.S. are turned into frozen orange juice concentrate, it's the juice
that is traded as a commodity, not the fruit.
An article that appeared in the Toronto Globe and Mail of 31st May 2008
argued that it was the deregulation of financial markets and the
systematic exploitation of US regulatory loopholes that had led to the
upsurge of speculative investments in food commodity markets, much of it
by institutional investors such as the managers of pension funds. "These
funds", wrote the authors, "have ploughed tens of billions of dollars
into agricultural commodities as a way of diversifying their assets and
improve returns for their investors.
According to the authors, the amount of fund money invested in commodity
indexes had climbed from just $13-billion in 2003 to a staggering
$260-billion in March 2008, according to calculations based on
regulatory filings. There were warnings that this amount could easily
quadruple to $1-trillion, if pension fund managers allocated a greater
portion of their portfolio to commodities, as some consultants suggested
they were poised to do. Thus, it was the progressive loosening of
regulatory requirements, which made possible the enormous influx of
money, much of it fleeing the meltdown in the market for mortgage-backed

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securities and the wider fallout, including big leveraged buyouts in banks.
Because agricultural markets are small - relative to stock markets - the
amount of cash pouring into these markets gives these funds substantial
clout. The authors observed that these big institutional investors
controlled enough wheat in futures instruments, which could supply the
needs of American consumers for the next two years. They blamed the
"demand shock" from these recent entrants to the commodities markets as
the primary factor behind the sudden soaring of food prices. They noted
that if no immediate action was taken, food and energy prices were bound
to rise still further leading to the catastrophic economic effects on
millions of already stressed U.S. consumers and the possible starvation
of millions of the worlds poor.
For instance, the Ontario Teachers' Pension fund, which began with a
modest investment in food commodities in 1997, had by 2008 invested some
3 billion dollars in this market. With rising investor activity and
increasing demand, prices began to rise. Between 2000 and 2007, the
price of wheat increased 147 per cent on the Chicago Board of Trade.
Over the same period, corn increased by 79 per cent and soybeans by 72
per cent. As more funds moved in to invest, speculators began clamour
for more flexibility with trading limits and since there were no
controls, the food commodity prices kept on rising.
It has been estimated that for every one percent increase in the price
of food, there is an additional 16 million people who go hungry. In its
briefing paper for the World Food Summit, the FAO Secretariat devoted
two whole paragraphs to the influence of financial markets in pushing
upwards the cost of staple food commodities in its assessment of recent
developments. However, it had nothing to say about the matter when it
came to recommending "policy options" for dealing with the problem. This
was not accidental, but a reflection of the positions of the States.
This is why it was correct to conclude, as we have done above, that for
the financial oligarchy who wield power in the States, the demand is
that the State must guarantee them communism (which can assure them
their needs) while for the producing and middle classes the attitude of
the State is only to guarantee them the conditions for free
competition for the little the financial oligarchy is able to leave
aside for the markets (to compete over according to their abilities
and devices). Financial markets in the global capitalist system, as well
as global inter-governmental organisations such as FAO, it seems, have
no policy options to attend to the needs of the starving masses. There
always are, however, options for bailing out the financial oligarchy
while the masses are left to the devices of the markets.
THE WAY OUT OF THE CRISIS FOR AFRICA
It is clear from the above that agricultural production has become a
victim of late capitalist crisis. This is as it has been because from
its birth capitalism had always profited from agriculture as an old
industry in which this industry provided the raw materials for its
expanded reproduction at low cost. Capitalist crisis has therefore

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contributed greatly to the exploitation of agricultural workers and

ultimately to its collapse. It did so first, by plundering the European
peasantry and converting them into paupers through the enclosure system
by using the proceeds for its primitive accumulation of capital as one
of the sources of its birth.
In so doing, it turned the peasants into workers and in its imperialist
phase turned to the colonies for agricultural raw materials where the
colonial peasant producers were paid prices below subsistence subsidised
by female and child free labour working on land. Only after
decolonisation and the establishment of the European Common Market did
Europe develop a common agricultural policy to avoid being starved in
case of wars in the post-colonial States.
Secondly, with the increasing securitisation of commodities, in which
the central banks relied on a variety of commodities to give value to
paper debt instruments, capitalists fell to agriculture in the
post-colonial States of Africa to save their currencies from collapse.
This as we saw above is what led to the escalation in the prices of food
products leading to their destruction as commodities. The collapse of
the dollar and other hard currencies has meant a doom for those
agricultural food products as their prices begun to plummet with the
collapsing currencies.
This is what the economists are calling a recession. But nobody knows
when the recession will end although many of them now agree that it is
already on in all the developed capitalist countries. So those who
believed that with high food prices the peasant producers would earn
high incomes had better rethink their arithmetic because they need to
revise their knowledge of how capitalism operates in its old age.
African agricultural and food production based on exports to the markets
of the developed countries can no longer be assured and so the African
farmer has to find a way out of this mess as quickly as possible.
What we have said above must already alert us as to what we have to do
to get out of the mess. First, we have to look at how we can survive in
terms of food availability. For the first time, we have to wake up to
the reality that African countries need a food security policy as a
matter of urgency about which leaders can no longer dilly-dally. That
means African countries have first to focus on the home market followed
by the regional market and finally the global market. With the home
market becoming the focus for our production, we can create regional
currencies because in that case we shall have no alternative but to
create them to serve the regional markets, but operating under
completely new conditions and principles. But we cannot develop a food
security based on food crops of which people have very little knowledge,
especially since with the currency crisis; we shall not have sufficient
dollars to buy foreign food products with in the short and medium terms.
This means we have to rely more on indigenous food products as the basis
of our food security, which we must quickly encourage the farmers to
revive. Although many of our indigenous food crops were abandoned in
favour of exotic products that could also be sold on the market, there

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is still a reservoir of knowledge about these crops in the rural

communities. So reviving these crops would not be an uphill task if we
have a policy that is driven with the same zeal as that of the current
production for export. The African elites will have to content
themselves with consuming indigenous crops since they can no longer
depend on exotic foreign products.
Secondly, we have to consider the strategy of encouraging cooperative
production because with the increasing population driven by poverty and
the great fragmentation of land holding, it will not be possible to
sustain families on the small farm-holdings. A cooperative policy also
presupposes a sound credit policy that can enable farmers to borrow for
their production and hence the need to hasten the creation of a regional
currency that can inform the creation of new local credit systems
drawing on the experiences of the informal sector. We should learn
what the people of Somaliland have done in this respect because they
have managed to create a very strong local currency that is not pegged
to any global currency.
The collapse of the global capitalist system will not mean the end of
the world! On the contrary, it will release the bottled up energies of
the people that have been suffocated by the collapsing capitalist
system. We shall survive by burying the old system and creating a new
one. Such a new system will have to be socialist-oriented since even the
most developed capitalist countries have no alternative but to do so as
we can already see with the whole sale nationalisation of banks
throughout Europe and the US. Some countries such as Iceland have
already gone bankrupt.
This means that even the political system has to change. The key to
political rejuvenation will lie in the deepening of democracy right
from the family level, to the clan and to the traditional institutions
level since the post-colonial state would have collapsed along with the
dollar. New forms of political power will emerge at a local level unless
new warlords try to occupy the political space. But the warlords are
already doomed as the Somali situation already demonstrates. The local
power structures will need a wider cooperative basis on the model of
confederal or federal regional states and we should consider Southern,
Eastern African or the Great Lakes region for such a partnership.
The development of local markets will need the backing of regional
markets for wider exchange of commodities. Therefore, new forms of
agricultural and industrial production will have to be tailored to local
needs and tastes. Similarly, new local markets will emerge in other
parts of the world calling for global exchanges of commodities with
those consumers. Eventually a new global currency or currencies based on
a basket of commodities will have to be created to facilitate these
exchanges on a completely new basis not based on capitalist
super-profits run by transnational corporations.
At a political level, we shall increasingly see the emergence of a
global civil society along side the new global market. Hence, we can
already envisage the emergence of a GLOCAL SOCIETY (a Global society

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based on local nationalities and global citizenship). Along side with

these developments will eventually emerge a federated global State,
which will be developed by the local powers. We can no longer return to
the caves, we can only move forward to a new world. Yes, a New World is
possible and it can now be said with certainty: A NEW WORLD IS INEVITABLE!
* Professor Dani W. Nabudere was the Executive Director of the Afrika Study
Centre

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IX
The Teachings of Ptah Hotep
The Oldest Book in the World
Asa G. Hilliard III, Larry Williams and Nia Damali Editors

(First published Circa 2388 B.C. to 2356 B.C. First Kemetic (Egyptian) Dynasty
under the title: Teachings of the Prefect of the City, Dja Ptahhotep under the
majesty of the king of the South and the North, Assa Djed - Ka- Ra, living eternally
forever.)

These are instructions by the Mayor of the City who is also the Vizier. His name is Ptahhotep
and he serves under Pharoah Assa who lives for all eternity. The mayor of the City, Vizier
Ptahhotep, addressed the Supreme Divinity, the Diety as follows:

"God upon the crocodiles." (Reference to Heru) who is sometimes shown standing on two
crocodiles. My God, the process of aging brings senility. My mind decays and forgetfulness
of the things of yesterday has already begun. Feebleness has come and weakness grows.
Childlike one sleeps all day. The eyes are dim and the ears are becoming deaf. The strength
is being sapped. The mouth has grown silent and does not speak. The bones ache through
and through. Good things now seem evil. The taste is gone. What old age does to people in
evil is everything. The nose is clogged and does not breath. It is painful even to stand
or to sit. May your servant be authorized to use the status that old age affords, to teach the
hearers, so as to tell them the words of those who have listened to the ways of our
ancestors, and of those who have listened to the Gods. May I do this for you, so that strife
may be banned from among our people, and so that the Two Shores may serve you?

Then the majesty of the Diety said to Ptahhotep, go ahead and instruct him in the Ancient
Wisdom. May he become a model for the children of the great. May obedience enter into
him, and may he be devoted to the one who speaks to him. No one is born wise.

And so begins the formulation of Mdw Ntr, good speech, to be spoken by the Prince, the
Count, God's beloved, the eldest son of the Pharoah, the son of his body, Mayor of the City
and Vizier, Ptahhotep, instructs the ignorant in the knowledge and in the standards of good
speech. It will profit those who hear. It will be a loss to those who transgress. Ptahhotep
began to speak to "Pharoah's son" (to posterity).
1. Do not be proud and arrogant with your knowledge. Consult and converse with ignorant
and the wise, for the limits of art are not reached. No artist ever possesses that perfection
to which he should aspire. Good speech is more hidden than greenstone (emeralds), yet it
may be found among maids at the grindstones.
2. If you meet a disputant in the heat of action, one who more powerful than you, simply
fold your arms and bend your back. To confront him will not make him agree with you. Pay
no attention to his evil speech. If you do not confront him while he is raging, people will
call him an ignoramus. Your self-control will be the match for his evil utterances.

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3. If you meet a disputant in action, one who is your equal, one who is on your level, you
will overcome him by being silent while he is speaking evilly. There will be much talk among
those who hear and your name will be held in high regard among the great.
4. If you meet a disputant in action who is a poor man and who is not your equal do not
attack him because he is weak. Leave him alone. He will confound himself. Do not answer
him just so that you can relieve your own heart. Do not vent yourself against your
opponent. Wretched is he who injures a poor man. If you ignore him listeners will wish to do
what you want. You will beat him through their reproof.
5. If you are a man who leads, a man who controls the affairs of many, then seek the most
perfect way of performing your responsibility so that your conduct will be blameless. Great
is Maat (truth, justice, and righteousness). It is everlasting. Maat has been unchanged since
the time of Osiris. To create obstacles ot the following of laws, is to open a way to
a condition of violence. The transgressor of laws is punished, although the greedy person
overlooks this. Baseness may obtain riches, yet crime never lands its wares on the shore. In
the end only Maat lasts. Man says, "Maat is my father's ground."
6. Do not scheme against people. God will punish accordingly; If a man says, "I will live by
scheming," he will lack bread for his mouth. If a man says, "I will be rich," he will have to
say, "My cleverness has trapped me." If he says, "I will trap for myself" he will not be able
to say, "I trapped for myself" he will not be able to say, "I trapped for my profit." If a man
says, "I will rob someone," he wiill end by being given to a stranger. People schemes do not
prevail. God's command is what prevails. Therefore, live in the midst of peace. What God
gives comes by itself.
7. If you are one among guests at the table of person who is more powerful than you, take
what that person gives just as it is set before you. Look at what is before you. Don't stare at
your host. Don't speak to him until he asks. One does not know what may displease him.
Speak when he has spoken to you. Then your words will please the heart. The man who has
plenty of the means of existence acts as his Ka commands. He will give food to those who
he favors. It is the Ka that makes his hand stretch out. The great man gives to the chosen
man, thus eating is under the direction of God. It is a fool who complains about it.
8. If you are a person of trust sent by one great person to another great person, be careful
to stick to the essence of the message that you were asked to transmit. Give the message
exactly as he gave it to you. Guard against provocative speech which makes one great
person angry with another. Just keep to the truth. Do not exceed it. However, even though
there may have been an out-burst in the message you should not repeat it. Do not malign
anyone, great or small, the Ka abhors it.
9. If you plow and if there is growth in your field and God lets it prosper in you hand, don't
boast to your neighbor. One has great respect for the silent person. A person of character is
a person of wealth. If that person robs, he or she like a crocodile in the middle of the
waters. If God gives you children, don't impose on one who has no children. Neither should
you decry or brag about having your own children, for there is many a father who has grief
and many a mother with children who is less content whan another. It is the lonely whom
God nurtures while the family man prays for a follower.
10. If you are poor, then serve a person of worth so that your conduct may be well with
God. Do not bring up the fact that he was once poor. Do not be arrogant towards him just
because you know about his former state. Respect him now for his position of authority. As

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for fortune, it obeys its own law and that is her will. It is God's gift. It is God who makes
him worthy and who protects him whil he sleeps, or who can turn away from him.
11. Follow your heart as long as you live. Do more than is required of you. Do not shorten
the time of "follow the heart", since that offends the Ka. Don't waste time on daily cares
over and beyond providing for your household. When wealth finally comes, then follow your
heart. Weatlh does no good if you are glum.
12. If you are a wise man, train up a son who will be pleasing to God. If he is straight and
takes after you, take good care of him. Do everything that is good for him. He is your son,
your Ka begot him. Don't withdraw your heart from him. But an offspring can make trouble.
If your son strays and neglects your council and disobeys all that is said, with his mouth
spouting evil speech, then punish him for all his talk. God will hate him who crosses you. His
guilt was determined in the womb. He who God makes boatless cannot cross the water.
13. If you are a guard in the storehouse, stand or sit rather than leave your post and
trepass into someones else's place. Follow this rule from the first. Never leave your post,
even when fatigued. Keen is the face to him who enters announced, and spacious is the
seat of him who has been asked to come in. The storehouse has fixed rules. All behaviour is
strictly by the rule. Only a God can penetrate the secure warehouse where the rules are
followed, even by privileged persons.
14. If you are among the people then gain your supporters by building trust. The trusted
man is one who does not speak the first thing that comes to mind; and he will become a
leader. A man of means has a good name, and his face is benign. People will praise him
even without his knowledge. On the other hand, he whose heart obeys his belly asks for
contempt of himself in the place of love. His heart is naked. His body is unanointed. The
great hearted is a gift of God. He who is ruled by his appetite belongs to the enemy.
15. Report the thing that you were commissioned to report without error. Give your advice
in the high council. If you are fluent in your speech, it will not be hard for you to report. Nor
will anyone say of you, "who is he to know this?" As to the authories, their affairs will fail if
they punish you for speaking truth. They should be silent upon hearing the report that you
have rendered as you have been told.
16. If you are a man who leads, a man whose authority reaches widely, they you should do
perfect things, those which posterity will remember. Don't listen to the words of flatterers or
to words that puff you up with pride and vanity.
17. If you are a person who judges, listen carefully to the speech of one who pleads. Don't
stop the person from telling you everything that they had planned to tell you. A person in
distress wants to pour out his or her heart, even more than they want their case to be won.
If you are one who stops a person who is pleading, that person will say "why does he reject
my plea?" Of course not all that one pleads for can be granted, but a good hearing soothes
the heart. The means for getting a true and clear explanation is to listen with kindness.
18. If you want friendship to endure in the house that you enter, the house of a master, of
a brother or of a friend, then in whatever place you enter beware of approaching the women
there. Unhappy is the place where this is done. Unwelcome is he who intrudes on them. A
thousand men are turned away from their good because of a short moment that is like a
dream, and then that moment is followed by death that comes from having known that
dream. Anyone who encourages you take advantage of the situation gives you poor advice.
When you go to do it, your heart says no. If you are one who fails through the lust of

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women, then no affair of yours can prosper.

19. If you want to have perfect conduct, to be free from every evil, then above all guard
against the vice of greed. Greed is a grievous sickness that has no cure. There is no
treatment for it. It embroils fathers, mothers and the brothers of the mother. It parts the
wife from the husband. Greed is a compound of all the evils. It is a bundle of all hateful
things. That person endures whose rule is righteous, who walks a straight line, for that
person will leave a legacy by such behavior. On the other hand, the greedy has no tomb.
20. Do not be greedy in the division of things. Do not covet more than your share. Don't be
greedy towards your relatives. A mild person has a greater claim than the harsh one. Poor is
the person who forgets his relatives. He is deprived of their company. Even a little bit of
what is wanted will turn a quarreler into a friendly person.
21. When you prosper and establish your home, love your wife with ardor. Then fill her belly
and clothe her back. Caress her. Give her oitments to soothe her body. Fulfill her wishes for
as long as you live. She is a fertile field for her husband. Do not be brutal. Good manners
will influence her better than force. Do not contend with her in the courts. Keep her from
the need to resort to outside powers. Her eye is her storm when she gazes. It is by such
treatment that she will be compelled to stay in your house.
22. Help your friends with things that you have, for you have these things by the grace of
God. If you fail to help your friends, one will say you have a selfish Ka. One plans for
tommorow, but you do not know what tomorrow will bring. The right soul is the soul by
which one is sustained. If you do praiseworthy deeds your friends will say, "welcome" in you
time of need.
23. Don't repeat slander nor should you even listen to it. It is the spouting of the hot
bellied. Just report a thing that has been observed, not something that has been heard
secondhand. If it is something negligible, don't even say anything. He who is standing
before you will recognize your worth. Slander is like a terrible dream against which one
covers the face.
24. If you are a man of worth who sits at the council of a leader, concentrate on being
excellent. Your silence is much better than boasting. Speak when you know that you have a
solution. It is the skilled person who should speak when in council. Speaking is harder than
all other work. The one who understands this makes speech a servant.
25. If you are mighty and powerful then gain respect through knowledge and through your
gentleness of speech. Don't order things except as it is fitting. The one who provokes others
gets into trouble. Don't be haughty lest you be humbled. But also don't be mute lest you be
chided. When you answer one who is fuming, turn your face and control yourself. The flame
of the hot hearted sweeps across everything. But he who steps gently, his path is a paved
road. He who is agitated all day has no happy moments but he who amuses himself all day
can't keep his fortune.
26. Do not disturb a great man or distract his attention when he is occupied, trying to
understand his task. When he is thus occupied, he strips his body through the love of what
he does. Love for the work which they do brings men closer to God. These are the people
who succeed in what they do.
27. Teach the great what is useful to them. Be an aide to the great before the people. If you
let your knowledge impress your leader, your substenance from him will then come from his

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soul. As his favorite's belly is filled, so will your back be clothed and his help will be there to
sustain you. For you leader whom you love and who lives by useful knowledge, he in turn
will give you good support. Thus will the love of you endure in his belly. He is a soul who
loves to listen.
28. If you are an official of high standing, and you are commissioned to satisfy the many,
then hold to a straight line. When you speak don't lean to one side or to the other. Beware
lest someone complain, saying to the judges, "he has distorted things", and then your very
deeds will turn into a judgement of you.

29. If you are angered by a misdeed, then lean toward a man on account of his rightness.
Pass over the misdeed and don't remember it, since God was silent to you on the first day
on your misdeed.
30. If you are great after having been humble, if you have gained your wealth after having
been poor, and then go to town that you know and that knows your former condition, don't
put your trust in your newly acquired wealth which has come to you as a gift of God. If you
do, one day someone there who is poor may very well overtake you.
31. Accept the authority of your leaders then your house will endure in it's wealth. Your
rewards will come from the right place. Wretched is he who opposes his leader. One lives as
long as he is mild. Baring your arm does not hurt it. Do not plunder your neighbor's house
or steal the goods of one that is near you, lest he denounce you before you are even heard.
One who is argumentative is a mildless person. If he is also known as an aggressor, then
that hostile man will have trouble in the neighborhood.
32. Be circumspect in matters of sexual relations.
33. If you examine the character of a friend, don't ask other people, approach your friend.
Deal with him alone, so as not to suffer from his anger. You may argue with him after a
little while. You may test his heart in conversation. If what he has seen escapes him, if he
does something that annoys you, stay friendly with him and do not attack. Be restrained
and don't answer him with hostility. Do not leave him and do not attack him. His time will
not fail to come. He cannot escape his fate.
34. Be generous as long as you live. What leaves the storehouse does not return. It is the
food in the storehouse that one must share that is coveted. One whose belly is empty
becomes an opponent. Therefore, do not have an accuser or an opponent as a neighbor.
Your kindness to your neighbors will be a memorial to you for years, after you satisfy their
needs.
35. Know your friends and then you prosper. Don't be mean towards your friends. They are
like a watered field and greater than any material riches that you may have, for
what belongs to one belongs to another. The character of one who is well born should
be a profit to him. Good nature is a memorial.
36. Punish firmly and chastise soundly, then repression of crime becomes an example. But
punishment except for crime will turn the complainer into an enemy.
37. If you take a wife a good time woman who is joyful and who is well known in the town,
if she is fickle and seems to live for the moment, do not reject her. Let her eat. The joyful
person brings happiness.

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If you listen to my sayings all of your affairs will go forward. Their value resides in their
truth. The memory of these sayings goes on in the speech of men and women because of
the worth of their precepts. If every word is carried on, they will not perish in this land. If
advice is given for the good, the great will speak accordingly. This is a matter of teaching a
person to speak to posterity. He or she who hears it becomes a master hearer. It is good to
speak to posterity. Posterity will listen.
If an example is set by him or her who leads, he or she will beneficient forever, his wisdom
lasting for all time. The wise person feeds the Ka with what endures, so that is is happy with
that person on earth. The wise is known by his or her wisdom. the great is known by his or
her good actions. The heart of the wise matches his or her tongue and his or her lips are
straight when he or she speaks. The wise have eyes that are made to see and ears that are
made to hear what will profit the offspring. The wise person who acts with Maat is free of
falsehood and disorder.
Useful is hearing to a son who hears. If hearing enters the hearer, then the hearer becomes
a listener. Hearing well is speaking well. Useful is hearing to one who hears. Hearing is
better than everything else. It creates good will. How good is it for a son to understand his
father's words. That son will reach old age through those words.
He who hears is beloved of God. He whom God hates does not hear. The heart makes of its
owner hearer or a non-hearer. Man's heart is his life, prosperity and health. The hearer is
one who hears what is said. He who loves to hear is one who acts on what is said. How
good is it for a son to listen to his father. How happy is he to whom it is said "Your son, is a
master of hearing." The hearer of whom this is said is well endowed indeed and is honored
by his father. That hearer's rememberance is in the mouth of the living, those that are on
earth and those who will be.
If a man's son accepts his father's words then no plan of his will go wrong. So teach your
son to be a hearer, one who will be valued by the officials, one who will guide his speech by
what he has been told, one who is regarded as a hearer. This son will excel and his deeds
will stand out while failure will follow those who do not hear. The wise wakes up early to his
lasting gain while the fool is hard pressed.
The fool who does not hear, he can do nothing at all. He looks at ignorance and sees
knowledge. He looks at harmfulness and see usefulness. He doees everything that one
detests and is blamed for it every day. He lives on the things by which one dies. His food is
evil speech. His sort is known to the officials who say, "There goes a living death every
day." One ignores the things that he does because of his many daily troubles.
A son who hears is a follower of Heru. It will go well with him when he has heard. When he
old and has reached the period where he is venerated, then he will speak likewise to his
own children, renewing then the teachings of his father.

Every man teaches as he acts. He will speak to the children so that they will speak to their
children. He will set an example and not give offense. So if justice stands firm, your children
will live. As to the first child who gets into trouble, when people see it, they will say about
the child "that is just like him", and they will also say when they even hear a rumor about
the child, "that is just like him too."

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To see everyone is to satisfy the many. Any riches that you have are useless without the
many. Don't say something and then take is back. Don't put one thing in place of another.
Beware of releasing the restraints in you, lest the wise man say, "listen, if you want to
endure in the mouth of the hearers, speak after you have mastered the craft." If you speak
to good purpose all your affairs will be in place.
Conceal your heart. Control your mouth. Then you will known among the officials. Be quite
exact before your leader. Act so that no one will say to him "he is the son of that one."

Be deliberate when you speak so as to say things that count. Then the officials who listen
will say, "how good is the thing that comes from his mouth." Act so that your leader will say
of you, "how good is he whom his father has taught. When he came forth from his body, he
told him all that was in his mind, and he does even more than he was told."
The good son is the gift of God and exceeds what is told him by his leader. He will do right
when his heart is straight. As you succeed me sound in body, a Pharoah, content with all
that was done, may obtain many years of life.
The things that I did on earth were not small. I have had 110 years of life. As a gift of the
Pharoah, I have had honors exceeding those of the ancestors, by doing Maat until the state
of veneration.
Is is done, from its beginning to its end, as it was found in the writings of the ancestors and
Diety.

Peace be upon you

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